SAIL Investments: scaling global private credit to protect nature

The approach, initiative or process 

SAIL Investments is a global private credit manager focused on accelerating the sustainability transition in core global industries. Its strategy is built on the conviction that nature – and the economic and social systems it supports – must be protected and restored as a condition for long-term value creation.

Sustainability is not an overlay. It is SAIL’s investment strategy and the principal driver of alpha, realised through a sustainable value creation plan (SVCP) tailored to each borrower. SAIL Investments believes deep integration of sustainability enables investors to unlock growth, build resilience and price risk more accurately across overlooked segments of the real economy.

SAIL Investments provides private credit to companies holding dominant, system-critical roles in global food and agriculture supply chains as they transition toward deforestation-free, biodiversity-positive and climate-resilient growth.

SAIL finances sustainable growth in sectors that underpin the global economy and depend heavily on nature. Its core investment universe – global agriculture-forestry-land-use sectors (AFOLU) – directly intersects with the world’s tropical forests which cover just 6% of the planet’s land surface and are home to 80% of the world’s documented species.^[2] These ecosystems face existential threats from deforestation and land-use change, the leading drivers of global nature loss.

SAIL believes protecting what remains of the world’s tropical forests – and the biodiversity and ecological functions within them – through strategic and scalable private credit is among the most impactful and cost-effective climate and nature strategies available to institutional capital.

SAIL’s investment strategy aligns with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and supports SDGs 2, 6, 8, 12, 13, 15, and 17. It reports under Sustainable Financial Directive Regulation (SFDR) Article 9 and has adopted Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosure (TNFD) and Taskforce for Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD) frameworks. Each SVCP, developed for every borrower, maps investment milestones to measurable nature and climate outcomes. These plans embed science-based sustainability strategies into borrower growth plans and are enforced through legally binding covenants.

SAIL begins with a global macro lens to identify credit opportunities where sustainability transition is both essential and investable. It focuses on supply chains critical to food security, economic development and ecological resilience, where climate and nature risks are material but underpriced.

SAIL pinpoints sectors that are highly vulnerable to climate and nature loss, yet poised for structural growth beyond 2050. These sectors are often mispriced due to unaccounted dependencies on natural capital, presenting opportunities to turn unpriced externalities into structured value. SAIL helps convert such risks into investable assets on institutional balance sheets.

While a significant majority of global private credit is concentrated in US and European sponsor-driven loans, SAIL operates in a broader, undercapitalised space. It finances large mid-market companies in emerging markets that are systemically important to global trade yet are often excluded from long-term, strategic capital aligned with sustainability. Its strategy helps correct this capital dislocation.

SAIL targets borrowers whose value is directly tied to ecosystems, biodiversity and local communities. It integrates science-based sustainability transition plans at the pre-investment stage and continues to monitor, verify and assure performance throughout the loan lifecycle.

To do this effectively, it originates and leads transactions in-house. SAIL has developed global origination capabilities, with senior professionals stationed in key markets and supported by its headquarters in the Netherlands. Originators are relationship leaders and embedded in cross-functional deal teams alongside investment and sustainability professionals, where the sustainability team holds a front-office function along the full investment process.

SAIL’s Chief Sustainability Officer holds a seat and veto right on the investment committee, ensuring all transactions meet integrated standards.

SAIL believes the market for deeply embedded, sustainability-driven finance – where meaningful value is unlocked through fundamental, bottom-up, verifiable and assured data-based analysis – will grow across capital-intensive industries. SAIL has built a global, scalable private credit platform to lead that growth.

SAIL does not rely on ESG ratings or backward-looking screens. Instead, it uses advanced geospatial intelligence and bottom-up environmental data to:

• baseline biodiversity risk and opportunity;
• originate in biodiversity-critical region;s
• monitor deforestation and ecosystem impact in near real-time.

Each investment is governed by the SVCP, combining an environmental and social action plan (ESAP), a sustainability management system and borrower-specific transition targets. These include biodiversity and social key performance indicators (KPIs), no deforestation no peat, no exploitation (NDPE) policies, traceability goals and restoration commitments, embedded as covenants in loan documentation.

SAIL embeds SVCPs at the core of its investment process to ensure credible and scalable outcomes. Its approach includes:

• independent annual verification of sustainability covenants (Big Four);
• third-party assurance of results and reporting;
• disclosures aligned with the Accountability Framework;
• transparent reporting under TNFD, SFDR, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), UN Global Compact and the PRI, among others.

SAIL prioritises real-world outcomes over proxy metrics, with each investment designed to address sector-specific drivers of deforestation and biodiversity loss. Examples include:

• Vietnam, coffee producer: Expansion of coffee and pepper cultivation in the Central Highlands has been a major driver of forest loss. Through the SVCP, SAIL is embedding full traceability and NDPE compliance across export supply chains, creating a replicable model for deforestation-free coffee production that directly influences thousands of smallholder farmers and safeguards globally significant forest frontiers.
• Brazil, corn and ethanol: Rapid corn expansion in Mato Grosso, often linked to deforestation as a second crop to soy, poses acute risks to the Cerrado and Amazon biomes. SAIL’s financing structures deforestation-free sourcing covenants and supplier conservation requirements into borrower agreements, redirecting land-use change toward sustainable intensification on degraded lands.
• Brazil, cattle ranching: Cattle ranching remains the single largest driver of Amazon and Cerrado deforestation, particularly through indirect suppliers. SAIL’s SVCPs enforce full traceability and NDPE criteria across entire supply chains, protecting millions of hectares of forest while cutting greenhouse gas emissions at scale in one of the hardest-to-abate global commodities. Marfrig, a global beef leader, is mapping and managing indirect supplier risk using satellite monitoring and geospatial tools.

Crucially, SAIL’s approach is not about steering for impact in the abstract. It focuses on the factors it can directly influence, and in doing so generate outsized positive value for the ecosystems it aims to protect and restore. Measuring this value is essential, even though the complexity of biodiversity and nature cannot be reduced to a single metric. This challenge is most acute in tropical forests, where countless undocumented species coexist in interdependent systems. To address this, we use a science-aligned KPI framework that consolidates the most material indicators for nature, climate and people, and translates them into clear, digestible metrics for investors. To date, our strategy has delivered the following:^[3]

• Forest protected: 3.12 million hectares of high-biodiversity forest protected;
• Climate benefits (tCO₂e avoided or sequestered): 13.24 million tonnes;
• Ecosystems with improved resilience: 3.35 million hectares;
• People with increased resilience: 62,652;
• People benefitting (jobs, training, services): 68,217.

SAIL recognises the importance of the TNFD, which has quickly become the most widely recognised framework for nature-related risk management and disclosure among institutional investors. It was an early adopter of TNFD and has embedded its recommendations into its investment governance and reporting. This includes integrating global biodiversity datasets and geospatial indicators – such as the presence of International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List species and proximity to Key Biodiversity Areas and deforestation hotspots – directly into its SVCPs. This ensures that nature-related risks and dependencies are systematically identified, monitored and disclosed across the portfolio. SAIL favours conservation over-compensation. Its first obligation is to protect what remains, because these ecosystems are irreplaceable, shaped over millions of years, and essential to planetary stability.

SAIL believes this is the private credit solution institutional investors increasingly require: scalable, long-term, diversified exposure that delivers attractive risk-adjusted returns, supports nature preservation and mitigates physical risk across portfolios.

Measures to ensure transparency and generate outcomes

Full transparency at SAIL begins with how it originates and select deals, and continues through every stage of the investment lifecycle. SAIL believes that if it is to channel capital into nature-linked investment opportunities with credibility, it must first understand those ecosystems deeply and then communicate in ways institutional investors can understand.

From an investment perspective, transparency starts in the field. The SAIL boots-on-the-ground origination teams work directly with companies who source their inputs across biodiversity-rich landscapes, globally. They are supported by deep due diligence processes involving site visits, independent third-party experts and advanced geospatial intelligence. Through SAIL’s proprietary Nature Framework, it we currently monitors more than 10 million hectares of tropical forests, using dynamic datasets to track the status of tropical forests globally.

In 2024, SAIL’s geospatial intelligence team identified an active fire event on one of its investee’s large farming operations in Brazil – well before the company itself was aware. Because SAIL embeds biodiversity expertise within its core team, it not only detected the incident early, but had the capacity to advise on how to mitigate the risk and improve the company’s early warning protocols. This level of situational awareness has been built over eight years of practice, continuously refining biodiversity monitoring tools and indicators. While many market actors cite the difficulty of accessing relevant biodiversity data, SAIL has built the systems, deep partnerships and field credibility to overcome those barriers.

On the reporting side, SAIL’s priority is translating this complex information into investor-relevant insights. One of the advantages of its non-sponsor-driven approach is that it gets direct access to primary sources of data, directly from the borrowers, that are then third-party verified and assured. SAIL reports quarterly and semi-annually to investors on both financial and sustainability performance, and annually for its first fund, The &Green Fund, that sets the benchmark for full transparency in tropical forest-linked investments. The publicly available &Green Annual Report includes detailed impact metrics and is designed to serve a wide audience – from donors to asset owners. The 2023 Annual Report is available online.

SAIL reports against leading global frameworks, including SFDR Article 9, TNFD, TCFD, the Sustainable Development Goals (2, 5, 6, 8, 12, 13, 15, 17), the UN Global Compact, and the PRI. From deal origination to impact disclosure, its approach is designed to ensure that every stakeholder can see, interrogate and validate the story behind the investment.

PRI disclaimer:This case study aims to contribute to the debate around topical responsible investment issues. It should not be construed as advice, nor relied upon. It is written by a guest contributor. Authors write in their individual capacity – posts do not necessarily represent a PRI view. The inclusion of examples or case studies does not constitute an endorsement by PRI Association or PRI signatories.