ADB's $2 billion FIELD test: can blended finance make land restoration bankable?

The Asian Development Bank and its partners launched a $2 billion financing initiative at a ministerial dialogue at COP17 of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification in Ulaanbaatar, called FIELD, for Financing Investments and Eradicating Land Degradation and Desertification. Built to attack the barrier that has stalled so much nature-based investment—the gap between environmental priorities and projects that can actually attract capital—the program aims to place degraded land across Asia and the Pacific under sustainable management by 2035.

FIELD will blend concessional finance, derisking mechanisms, and capital market instruments to bring private investors into projects that have historically depended on grants and development dollars, with the capital markets piece suggesting ADB expects some funding to reach investors through tradable securities and give the initiative a footprint in the labeled bond market. ADB will also provide grants and technical assistance to member countries—policy development, capacity building, and a regional knowledge platform—and an initial pipeline spans land and forest restoration, river basin management, and water programs.

The need is large: drylands support more than 40% of the Asia-Pacific population, according to ADB, and rangelands—a central part of the dryland economy—cover 54% of the world's land surface and store up to 30% of global soil carbon. Those assets have attracted only a trickle of the capital they need while drought, soil erosion, and unsustainable land use add pressure to food and water systems across the region and degradation threatens agricultural production and biodiversity.

ADB Vice-President for East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Scott Morris put the case directly: "Land degradation and desertification is a critical threat to ecosystems that sustain millions of rural communities and underpin economic growth in our region—a challenge that no one country can tackle alone."

Multilateral banks have spent years talking about blending public and private capital for nature; FIELD is an attempt to actually do it. The $2 billion target is real money, but it is also a proof-of-concept number, large enough to test whether derisking tools and capital market instruments can make land restoration bankable at scale. One million hectares under sustainable management by 2035 is a modest slice of the region's drylands, which suggests ADB is treating FIELD as a pilot rather than a cure. The initiative will be judged on whether it can attract follow-on private capital without a fresh round of public seed money—the standard for any blended finance claim to move beyond the brochure stage.

The initiative sits inside ADB's broader climate turn. The bank has pledged that half of its lending will go to climate finance by 2030, and land restoration is a natural channel for that commitment to show up in nature-based outcomes, since soil carbon is a meaningful piece of the climate ledger—rangelands alone hold up to 30% of global soil carbon—and degraded land is a drag on agricultural output. A successful FIELD would give ADB a repeatable asset class, not just a portfolio of projects.

FIELD could still become a donor-funded program with a private-sector veneer. Blended finance works when the concessionary layer is structured to exit, not when it becomes a permanent subsidy. ADB's design—derisking mechanisms and capital market instruments—points in the right direction, but the proof will be in the second round: if FIELD can raise money from private investors at rates that reflect actual land-based returns, it will have done something genuinely new; if it cannot, the $2 billion will sit in the books as another development program with a green label.

ADB is not starting from scratch: the initial pipeline includes land and forest restoration and river basin management, and the knowledge platform is intended to standardize project design so that the next round of deals does not have to be reinvented—the kind of operational detail where blended finance initiatives often succeed or fail.

The region's drylands need structures that convert restoration into revenue, and FIELD is the most serious attempt yet to build them. The second round of fundraising will arrive before the 2035 hectare tally is final, and it will be the more meaningful number.