Green Wealth
How to Turn Unusable Land into Moneymaking Assets
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Only a fraction of this country’s land can be farmed or developed. What happens to the land that is not economically viable? Until a few years ago, the value of such property would have remained flat, with little prospect of appreciating. Today, however, the Federal government has created a huge incentive to turn this land into moneymaking assets. Green Wealth explains how newly enacted laws can benefit those who invest in environmentally reconstituted land development.
The Feds, along with many state governments, now allow for the creation of individual environmental “banks,” which are established by converting unproductive property into new wetlands, endangered species reserves, water storage reservoirs, and a host of other types of environmentally protected land. Credits are then issued to the landowners—credits that can be sold to developers seeking to build on previously protected properties. As building continues in one place, new environmentally sound acreage is created in another. Now you can perform an environmentally responsible service and make a highly profitable investment at the same time.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This dense and informative introduction to environmental banking, written by two eco-bank cofounders, guides private investors in setting up a viable business that can help restore ecological balance. More abstract than financial banking, this environmental model allows the banker to cultivate an environmental project such as a wetland, and to "sell" its positive impact as "credits" to a company that might have harmed other wetlands, in an attempt to restore overall balance. The concept introduces entrepreneurialism and profitability into resource management, countering previous strategies of "command and control" that have allowed industry to ignore or simply pay fines for environmental transgressions, or to make inadequate moves to restore the environment. After defining the concept and providing an industry overview, the authors explain how to set up such a bank and instruct readers on evaluating profitability. In addition to supplying significant detail on the various bank types (particularly for wetlands, but also for endangered species, carbon, water quality and land development rights), they include an annotated business plan, prospectus and an appendix of resource recommendations. More than just an introduction to this complex subject, this comprehensive and definitive guide offers readers a blueprint for starting their own banks.
