Request For Proposals Brief

Kasey Krifka, The Climate Trust
April 29, 2016

Climate Trust Capital, an independent firm of The Climate Trust, has launched its first carbon investment fund (Fund I) with the goal of investing $5.5 million into innovative carbon projects in forestry, grassland conservation, and livestock digesters. The Trust was encouraged to receive a strong response to our initial Request For Proposals (RFP), with two dozen project proposal submissions.

To track the performance of Fund I, we continually monitor metrics related to our project pipeline and management activities, as well as feedback from our project partners regarding our offering, services, and communications.

Although we are at a very early stage of our evaluation process, we would like to share some initial data about our Fund I pipeline of projects.

This chart outlines the sector of each of the projects evaluated during the RFP process. As mentioned during the RFP application process, The Trust is only considering biogas, forestry and grassland projects as eligible. We are pleased to see interest from other sectors, and as our investment fund scales, we hope to incorporate additional sectors.

As applicants may have noticed, The Trust collects feedback on our project developer/landowner engagement process, by encouraging voluntary participation in a survey at key milestones along the conservation finance application and contracting process. Thus far, The Trust has received feedback from a handful of project developers, and would like to encourage other applicants to take part and offer feedback.

The feedback we’ve gathered thus far has been overwhelmingly positive, with an overall average score of 4.25 out of 5. A total of nine areas were evaluated in the survey. Respondents ranked each question on a scale of 1 to 5 (4 or 5 = positive; 3 = neutral; 1 or 2 = negative; or N/A).

The highest scoring areas include (numbers in parenthesis are averages):

• Timeliness of responses (4.67)
• Likelihood of working with us in future (4.5)
• Clarity of information requests (4.5)
• Clarity of timeline/adherence to timeline (4.5)

“Although no project funding decisions have yet been made, we wanted to take the opportunity to recognize the applicants of our 2016 RFP and extend our gratitude for the time and care they showed in crafting these impressive proposals,” said Elizabeth Hardee, senior analyst for The Climate Trust. “We look forward to engaging further with our applicants to better understand the alignment of their finance needs with the investment thesis of our fund,” added Hardee.

The Climate Trust has performed initial feasibility assessments of the proposals received and will keep applicants apprised as they work through the evaluation process. Final contracts will be executed by mid-December.

Image credit: Flickr/Theophilos Papadopoulos