We produce research designed to facilitate investment.

Despite providing society with $150+ trillion of goods, services, and experiences, our biosphere is being degraded at record rates. Private capital markets are squarely in the crosshairs of both the problem and solution sets to the nature crisis—yet many investors struggle to understand how to approach the nature theme.

Defining an Investment Agenda for Nature: A Guide for Family Office Investors seeks to demystify the nature theme for family office investors by charting current funding flows, presenting common commercialization models, and illustrating how those approaches get applied by analyzing nature-related funds on the CREO Data Platform."

Since 2017, there has been a significant increase in the number of ocean startups focused on "nature-positive" initiatives—integrated efforts that support biodiversity, address climate change, and empower communities for a sustainable future on Earth. These innovative ventures have collectively attracted over $2.2 billion in venture funding, underscoring a growing commitment to ocean health.

While technological innovation is driving investment in this sector, it is crucial to accelerate both commercial readiness and market demand. To fully realize the potential of these initiatives, we must increase interest and mobilize new capital for ocean-positive investment opportunities.

Success in this dynamic field will pave the way for a sustainable and thriving marine ecosystem. CREO's latest report, "Ocean-Positive Investments Market Snapshot," highlights the funding gaps experienced by various ocean-positive segments. It also emphasizes the opportunities that come from increased interest in market-based investing across different asset classes in ocean-positive solutions within the investment landscape. 

2024 has been called the hottest year on record for geothermal. Next-generation geothermal players announced exciting technology advancements, hyperscaler agreements, and raised almost as much as in all years prior.

CREO’s latest report “Geothermal power generation market snapshot” provides a market update for the geothermal sector.

Geothermal has been a relatively small portion of the power mix in the US, currently around less 0.4%. But there’s more potential just below the surface, as new technologies adopted in part from the oil and gas industry have greatly expanded the generation potential.

Like nuclear, geothermal appears poised to provide clean, firm, dispatchable power at relatively low costs. Unlike nuclear, the geothermal sector is relatively new and innovation in project finance to derisk scaling the new technologies could be critical in getting the sector off the ground.

The United States will need a massive 500-1,000 GW of clean firm generation by 2050 – for reference, the IEA recently put the total global installed capacity from all sources at 9,400 GW. Driven by grid decarbonization and load growth from electrification and new demand from sources like AI data centers, this trend powers investment opportunities up and down the capital stack and across technologies, including many such as nuclear and geothermal that dominated headlines and deal flow in 2024.

CREO's latest report from David Siap examines the technologies that will meet the demand for clean firm generation and gives a perspective on how to invest in the sector, which is comprised of many players at varying stages of maturity.  Clean firm startups have raised over $10B to date, much in the last few years, and while the sector shows no signs of slowing down it’s not without risk.

The report provides a snapshot of the AI in the aquatech landscape, analyzes recent funding trends, and identifies potential solutions that will improve aquaculture production's financial viability and sustainability in the near and long term.

In recent years, AI has grown in importance in aquaculture research and production, with both startups and established corporations developing new AI-based applications for the industry. The AI aquatech sector has attracted more than $630 million in venture capital funding over the last decade, with the bulk of that capital deployed into solutions in the last three years.

Although most startups provide farm management solutions, additional opportunities exist for investors who are not afraid to invest at the seams, finding gaps and frictions in the sector that have been overlooked but can have a high potential impact on industry growth.

Deploying climate technology in large-scale infrastructure projects is essential to meet urgent sustainability goals. Engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contracts can play a critical role in the financing and construction of these projects.

Understanding the importance of EPC contracts, as well as their benefits and limitations and how to evaluate, negotiate, and customize them, can help climate entrepreneurs and investors increase the chances that projects are built on-budget and on-time. 

Climate technology must be rapidly deployed soon and on a massive scale to meet ever-more-urgent sustainability goals, but these projects face unique financing challenges.

CREO analyzed dozens of demonstration and commercial scale climate projects, identifying innovative development approaches and key trends across project size, sector, technology scale, government support, and risk mitigation.

This research seeks to answer questions about climate project development, such as “what are the characteristics of climate projects that seek financing?” and “what de-risking steps do developers take to deploy climate technology more rapidly?”

This research paper provides a snapshot of the increasing popularity of floating offshore wind as a clean energy alternative and its investment landscape. The authors found that there are numerous investment opportunities across the capital stack in this rapidly evolving industry, supported by growing international and domestic policy clean energy commitments. 

Emphasizing that technological innovation will be a key driver of progress in the floating offshore wind sector, the paper also finds that this progress can reduce production costs while boosting throughput rates.  

The authors also identify various technological innovations within the floating offshore wind value chain, discuss the types of financing needed to accelerate industry progress, and write about how this indicates the need to engage industry incumbents, and addresses policy enablers and blockers. 

CREO’s latest market research provides a snapshot of the EV charging software landscape. The paper includes a framework to view the current landscape of startups in the space as well as some analysis of recent funding trends.

Vehicle-grid integration (VGI) focused players have attracted the lion’s share of funding in H1 2024 while the rest of the sector seems primed for consolidation. This suggests VGI will remain a target for growth equity and investors in other subsectors may be more opportunistic.

The private sector has a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on the growing momentum in global climate and sustainability (“climate”) finance.

Annual global climate finance flows doubled in the two years from 2020 to 2022, reaching $1.4trn or 1% of global GDP, but will need to increase sixfold to average $8.6trn through 2030, and $10.7trn through 2050, to reach net zero. The public sector alone cannot meet the $7.2trn gap in annual finance needs up to 2030, but it is vital for catalyzing private finance.

Sixty percent of critical climate technologies are ready for commercial scaling. Yet there remains a need to push technologies across all climate sectors past the “tipping point” where costs reduce significantly.

In this paper we discuss how successfully scaling these technologies will not only mitigate emissions but also unlock new value pools across sectors estimated to be as large as $12trn annually, providing opportunities for private market investors.

First-of-a-kind (FOAK) commercial projects are a pivotal milestone in scaling emerging climate technologies. FOAK projects can carry distinct risks and struggle to attract sufficient capital. The CREO FOAK framework identifies characteristics that qualify a commercial climate project as “first” - helping to demonstrate deployment precedent, reduce perceptions of risk, and allay financier concerns.

This paper illustrates the framework’s usefulness by applying it to carbon management technologies. Due to the relative nascency of these technologies, many of the commercial-scale projects within the sector are first-of-a-kind. Detailed project descriptions and data visualizations within the paper exhibit the scalability of carbon management technology projects. The FOAK framework should help to remove obstacles to financing and achieving decarbonization objectives within and beyond the carbon management sector.

This analyst note aims to map the emerging biological crop protection landscape and discuss common pitfalls and opportunities when attempting to scale novel mechanisms of action. The note develops a bioprotection product taxonomy, discusses the use cases for each bioprotection segment, and addresses the commercialization and scaling challenges that many products face when aiming to make it to market.

The paper discusses Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) and its potential as a negative emissions technology that could help mitigate ocean acidification. It also examines the obstacles currently hindering the industry's growth (i.e., scientific, technological, policy, and funding barriers). Additionally, the paper identifies potential solutions necessary to create the enabling conditions that would help develop the industry in a reliable, transparent, and trustworthy manner.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is accelerating an upcoming wave of clean energy asset replacement, including PV modules and EV batteries, in the United States. This trend creates an opportunity to redeploy these assets for second-life applications, promoting a circular economy. Disadvantaged communities in the U.S. and Latin America, especially in Mexico and Central America, stand out as opportune destinations for these assets, given their geographic proximity to the US and the potential economic, social, and climate benefits.

There is an opportunity to establish a trusted organization in the U.S. to consolidate clean energy assets, ensure quality, and foster reuse. Through a pilot program, this initiative could kickstart aggregation, redeployment, and traceability, paving the way for government funding and strategic partnerships. This organization could become the enabling intermediary that unlocks a meaningful reuse pathway, helping to pave the way for a cleaner, brighter future across Latin America.

CREO is excited to share this research paper by Kobi Weinberg, “An Introduction to Risk Transfer Solutions for Climate Projects.” The paper explores how insuring and hedging risks can help climate companies build infrastructure that scales their technology. Risk transfer solutions are essential for decarbonization projects (e.g., hydrogen, sustainable aviation fuel, cement, steel, and carbon dioxide removal) to attract the millions or billions of dollars in private financing.

The paper is the second of a series of forthcoming introductory guides that familiarize readers with key elements of climate project development and finance. Our goal is to accelerate the construction of climate infrastructure. The first paper covered climate offtake agreements. Future papers will likely cover topics such as EPC contracts, government de-risking mechanisms, debt structures, and catalytic capital arrangements.

In this review, Anthony Courreges compiles the literature on the sustainability benefits of Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) versus more traditional building materials. The paper discusses CLT’s actual and potential uses, costs, risks, and operational considerations for risk mitigation. There is also a perspective for developers on the factors to consider during implementation.

The real estate sector is entering a generational transformation that will shift the entire industry towards a greater focus on sustainability. This flagship research builds on 20+ years’ sectoral experience from its lead author, Paul Rabinovitch, to present a solid investment thesis in decarbonizing real estate. With this work, CREO aims to support family offices, wealth managers, and advisors to navigate this ongoing transformation with the dual objective of value creation paired with social and environmental impact.

The Fundamentals of Climate Investing for Families aims to distill a decade of learning from the CREO community on climate investing and the climate marketplace. CREO has defined Five Archetypes to showcase easy ways to get started and help families navigate the increasingly complex journey to invest in climate solutions. This paper is well suited to family offices and their related organizations, wealth managers, advisors and anyone looking for useful insights from other families to contextualize performance or consider strategic shifts within their own organizations and with their clients.

Offtakes are an important tool for decarbonization infrastructure projects. They ensure cash flow to climate technology suppliers, demonstrate demand (product-market fit), and ease access to non-dilutive capital. This introductory paper describes the key features of an offtake.

Canada has a great economic opportunity to build and export decarbonization solutions the world needs. Canadian family offices have a leading role to play by leveraging their unique toolkit: investment attributes, networks of influence, philanthropic capacity, and a knowledge base built from operating businesses and other work.

Our new report discusses how family offices can catapult the Canadian clean economy to supply the global decarbonization transition.

The adoption of electric vehicles is on course to ramp up dramatically by 2030, pushed forward by ambitious targets and legislation in China, the EU, UK and US.  By 2030, the number of EVs on the road is predicted to reach over 300 million globally, which will create tremendous demand for charging infrastructure. In this snapshot, we take a look at the growing EV charging market, and we explore opportunities for investment.

The transportation sector is undergoing a revolution: from electrification to shifting mobility patterns and automation, this transformation is not only creating technological risk for fleet owners, but also operational and financial challenges. Those factors have created strong incentives to outsource fleet ownership to specialist third parties with better expertise and access to capital. In this snapshot, we map out the fast-changing MaaS landscape, and we outline investment pathways across various subsectors. 

Every day, CREO and Cambridge Associates encounter wealth owners, families, and family office professionals who are starting down the path of sustainability investing. This paper details the typical path these investors take, the questions many of them face, and the way that many of them successfully develop a winning strategy that generates both returns and impact.

Lessons from the CREO Oceans, Seafood, and Aquaculture Investor Consortium