Nature Is the New Asset Class and Atlantic Canada Is Leaving Billions on the Table
New Brunswick's Cassidy Lake is the warning and Nova Scotia's EverWind is the proof that institutional capital will invest in natural assets – or leave the East Coast and its extractive mindset behind
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When the Head of the UK Government’s Economic Service, Nicholas Stern, published The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change in 2006, I felt vindicated.
Stern’s report treated climate change as a macroeconomic risk and attempted to estimate the economic cost of rising temperatures. At last, someone with real institutional authority had attached a price to environmental loss.
I was enrolled in an MSc in Environmental Management at the time. At my job in communications and risk management for a global container shipping company, my assertion that environmental harm carried a financial cost was often met with polite disbelief. Stern changed the terms of that argument. Once environmental damage had a calculable price, it could no longer be dismissed as sentiment.
Twenty years on, Atlantic Canada’s need for investment capital and infrastructure is within reach. The money exists. The obstacles are bureaucratic: siloed policies, misaligned regulations and governance structures that leave money on the table.
In the first article in this series, I argued that Atlantic Canada sits on environmental assets that global investors want. The absence of capital is not a verdict on the value of those assets. It is a verdict on the architecture, the missing market infrastructure.
Hari Balasubramanian, founder of EcoAdvisors and EcoInvestors Capital in Halifax, has advised on more than $6 billion in sustainability financing across 60 countries. Meaghan Seagrave of Bioindustrial Innovation Canada works at the intersection of Atlantic Canada’s resource economy and the capital that could transform it. Neither is reticent to explain what stands in the way.
Investment-ready natural systems
Balasubramanian describes his work as reconciling “our relationship with the planet.” He argues that nature underpins the global economy, yet markets largely reward extracting it rather than protecting it. His work builds market and investment structures that allow ecosystems to generate returns without only large-scale extraction, and with additional income from carbon, water, and biodiversity, extending the logic of the Stern Review: once nature has value, protecting it can become competitively profitable.
The problem, he argues, is the missing financial architecture between ecosystems and investors, what he calls the ‘broken middle.’
Individual projects, like a forest carbon programme or a watershed restoration, are usually too small for institutional capital. His approach is to bundle such assets, stacking revenue streams from tourism, renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, carbon, water, biodiversity, and other nature-aligned activities into diversified portfolios large enough for pension funds.
Why Atlantic Canada’s natural capital isn’t counted
Atlantic Canada has forests sequestering carbon, certified fisheries and tidal resources studied for decades. None of this automatically translates into investable value.
“The main reason that natural capital is valued today is based on its extractive value. If you take a forest and convert it to timber value, you can monetise the boards,” says Balasubramanian.
Keep the forest standing, and scientists can measure its value in carbon or water filtration. But no one is paying for those benefits. A standing forest becomes an investable asset only when market infrastructure exists to convert that value into tradeable financial instruments, and bundle enough assets together to interest institutional investors.
The $400 million that had no takers
The broken middle is not only a market failure. Meaghan Seagrave tells a story that shows it also determines whether Atlantic Canada’s governments can even recognize an investment opportunity.
When PotashCorp (now Nutrien) closed its flooded potash mine at Cassidy Lake near Penobsquis, NB in 2016, roughly 400 workers lost their jobs. Community leaders commissioned a feasibility study. Nutrien provided site access, data and funding. The results suggested a viable geothermal project with a payback period of less than 10 years.
Two multinational greenhouse operators, one British, one Dutch, looked at the combination of geothermal power and agricultural land and saw a business investment.
“The first build would have been for a $400 million investment to build one greenhouse, and then they were looking at doing land-based windmills, because of the location,” Seagrave explains.
But nothing happened. Opportunities New Brunswick did not know where to place the proposal. New Brunswick’s Department of Agriculture said it did not do greenhouses. The Energy Department did not talk to farmers. No one in government would take a meeting. So the investors left.
The broken middle, the missing translation layer between asset and capital market, is one problem. Cassidy Lake reveals another: Even when capital appears, the institutional machinery to receive it does not exist.
Two projects, one lesson still being learned
EverWind Fuels offers a different outcome. Earlier this week the company announced it has secured $240 million (US$175 million) from Nuveen Energy Infrastructure Credit to advance 650 megawatts of onshore wind across Nova Scotia – the power source for the Point Tupper Green Fuels Project in Cape Breton, what EverWind describes as North America's first large-scale green hydrogen and ammonia facility. What made the project financeable was structure. Membertou First Nation’s majority ownership gave the project governance credibility. Years of permitting and engineering converted a concept into something investors could evaluate through standard due diligence.
The structure echoes the 2020 acquisition of Clearwater Seafoods by a coalition of seven Mi’kmaw First Nations, financed through the First Nations Finance Authority. In both cases Indigenous equity ownership was not symbolic; it created governance stability, reduced regulatory risk and made unfamiliar projects legible to institutional capital. The First Nations Finance Authority has deployed more than $2.5 billion since 2014 without a single loan default, holding investment-grade ratings from three major agencies.
World Energy GH2 is the counterexample. Once considered a strong player in Atlantic Canada’s hydrogen ambitions, the project entered creditor protection after a dispute with the Newfoundland government over Crown land reserves. Court filings show the consortium carrying roughly $100 million in liabilities. The project assumed a hydrogen market would appear quickly and that political goodwill would hold. When neither did, there was no financial structure strong enough to absorb the risk.
Building the missing architecture
Atlantic Canada is not competing for capital on the strength of its resources. It is competing on the strength of the institutions that translate those resources into investments.
In December 2024, the federal government asked the Canadian Climate Institute to support the development of a Canadian sustainable investment taxonomy, building on earlier work by the Sustainable Finance Action Council. As that framework takes shape, the first priority sectors are expected to emerge by the end of 2026 — decisions that will influence which environmental assets investors can recognise and price.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick has 42,000 woodlot owners and no provincial mechanism to pool their carbon assets into something institutional capital can hold.
Someone has to be responsible for saying yes to the next Cassidy Lake. That means cross-departmental mandates, investment offices with real authority and governments that understand the difference between a resource waiting to be extracted and a financial asset that requires a different institutional response.
Balasubramanian is candid about why, despite his roots in Atlantic Canada, he is not concentrating his most ambitious work here. The conversations are harder. The institutional risk aversion is higher. Every year the architecture is not built is another year that capital finds somewhere else to go.
The assets are not going anywhere. The investors can and do.
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AI Summary: Atlantic Canada holds billions in untapped natural capital, but outdated, extraction‑focused institutions keep investors out. The failed Cassidy Lake geothermal project shows how siloed departments block viable proposals, while EverWind proves that clear governance and Indigenous ownership can attract major financing. Until the region builds the financial architecture to treat nature as an asset—carbon, water, biodiversity—global capital will keep moving elsewhere.