Sound design and strategic planning are vital for laying the foundations for success. Conservation Alpha provides various consulting services such as facilitating processes, strategy development, and advising on governance-management structures. Conservation Alpha has experience developing protected area management strategies, national wildlife crime strategies and conservation investment strategies. Additionally, we have developed strategies to drive coordinated action by conservation coalitions like the International Consortium for Combatting Wildlife Crime or the Universal Ranger Support Alliance. We offer services evaluating projects, having been both implementers and evaluators of conservation projects, including those financed by large-scale multi-lateral funding.

Impact measurement is critical if conservation is to become a results-based industry that attracts large-scale financing. Conservation Alpha supports its clients to develop impact monitoring frameworks and systems, to create data management systems, to design monitoring protocols and to develop verification processes for auditing impact. Conservation Alpha was involved in the full development chain for the impact measurement component of the Wildlife Conservation Bond, designing the monitoring and evaluation processes, the statistical models to estimate abundance, the evidence requirements, and the database systems for supporting verification. Based on this, Conservation Alpha has been appointed as the Calculation Agent, responsible for working with the sites to ensure they achieve and maintain the minimum monitoring standards and analysing and reporting on impact to the investors and outcome payers.

Conservation Alpha is currently supporting one of our clients with one of the largest challenges of impact measurement. Our aim is to develop cost effective, verifiable impact measurement systems for carbon, biodiversity, and human well-being indicators, that can be clearly communicated through a dashboard, informing a new financing mechanism.

Conservation Alpha provides custom solutions to large-scale conservation problems. Through our exposure across a wide network of conservation organisations and players, we understand best-practice solutions and assist conservation partners to increase performance through an outcomes-based approach. An increasingly effective mechanism for delivering conservation performance within protected area systems is to look at the implementation of collaborative management partnership models. Conservation Alpha has experience in helping government partners and corporate clients to design and implement such models, which mitigate risk and focus on delivering results.

Biodiversity conservation faces a significant funding shortfall which must be addressed if we are going to achieve global commitments to sustainable development, reversing biodiversity loss and tackling climate change. The sector needs to catalyse private sector funding at scale and improve efficiency of expenditure to address this funding gap. Conservation Alpha is driven by designing projects that generate funding through effective and efficient implementation, where impact can be delivered and verified.

Innovative financing represents an opportunity to close the funding gap once suitable financial products are developed. However, conservation-focused funds and investors require oversight for their investment from people who understand conservation. Conservation Alpha has experience developing financial products from inception to investment. We understand investor needs and can provide practical solutions for ensuring a fund design is focused, cost-efficient, logical, and auditable. Our experience includes structuring products, supporting selection of suitable areas for investment, conducting due diligence, preparing conservation partners for investment, and developing intervention strategies (Theories of Change) including budgeted workplans. Conservation Alpha is supporting the IUCN to develop a financing mechanism for the IUCN Green List and NATURAL STATE to structure an integrated credit structure that enables large-scale investment in nature restoration projects that protect and restore biodiversity and improve well-being for local communities.