Sustainable financing
and business planning

Sound business and financial planning is a prerequisite too often overlooked. Well-grounded assessments of start-up and operating costs, plus potential funding and revenue sources are critical to designing effective organizations and initiatives, and comprehensive business plans can keep stakeholders centered on organizational strengths, values and objectives.

Aralia creates tailored business plans for environmental initiatives and institutions. We work with our partners to refine objectives, identify core competencies, and develop strategies to achieve goals, and we couple these with assessments of markets and financing options to identify realistic operationalization scenarios. Over the course of more than a decade, our team has developed and refined a bottom-up cost and revenue model to support systematic consideration of the financing required to support environmental initiatives and organizations, and we have deployed these tools in dozens of projects across numerous geographies, in support of planning for protected area networks, CSO and private sector organizations, REDD+ projects, and non-timber forest product development.

Our team assesses both existing and potential revenue streams and designs strategies to maximize revenues from sustainable sources. In addition to traditional private and public sector financing, our team has designed and implemented payments for ecosystem services in conservation and carbon sequestration, user fees, and conservation trust funds to address financing gaps.