Craig Holland
Craig Holland is the Senior Director of Investments for The Nature Conservancy.
Ann Arbor, MI
Craig Holland Craig is Senior Director of Investments for The Nature Conservancy's Healthy Cities Program. © Kirth Bobb
Areas of Expertise
Green infrastructure investment and deployment, Urban water management
Biography
Craig is the Senior Director of Investments for The Nature Conservancy. In this role, Craig advances global strategies to develop and drive investment in environmental markets related to urban conservation activities and leads a team to oversee the implementation of these strategies. Specializing in investment and deployment of nature- and technology-based solutions for distributed water management, Craig helped develop private financing mechanisms for Philadelphia’s Green City Clean Waters initiative and co-authored the National Resources Defense Council’s January 2013 report “Creating Clean Water Cash Flows: Developing Private Markets for Green Stormwater Infrastructure in Philadelphia.”
Craig founded and is the Vice President of District Stormwater, LLC, the largest supplier of credits to the U.S.’s first stormwater offset market in Washington, D.C. He also serves as the CEO and President of the Board of Brightstorm, a TNC venture that builds projects and programs for water quality and flood resilience on behalf of government and corporations. Additionally, he led the development of Rainsteward, the first integrated software platform that helps landowners discover, prioritize, and measure water impact across property portfolios throughout the entire U.S.
Craig has also provided technical assistance to communities contemplating changes to their land-use ordinances, building regulations, and stormwater rates. His recent projects include serving: on a technical advisory committee within the City of Detroit that is tasked with the development of a new stormwater ordinance and related changes to the City’s building codes; as an advisor to NRDC and the NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business in their work with NYC DEP to catalyze private property green infrastructure investment; as an advisor to the City of Berlin, Germany to determine policy and procurement pathways for greater implementation of nature-based solutions; and as an advisor to the Chinese government to provide recommendations on accelerating green urbanization and regional integrated development.
He is a member of the Environmental Financial Advisory Board to the U.S. EPA, where he co-chaired a workgroup on Chesapeake Bay water quality financing, served on the Federal Stormwater Taskforce, and most recently provided guidance on the structuring and launch of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $28 billion fund enabled by the Inflation Reduction Act. He is also on the Expert Taskforce for the Global Commission on Nature-Positive Cities within the World Economic Forum’s Centers for Urban Transformation and Nature and Climate.
Craig has taught environmental markets classes at Columbia University and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He has also published articles for outlets including Environmental Finance, GreenBiz, the Climate Change Business Journal, and Storm Water Solutions. He contributed the chapter “Regulatory-Driven Mitigation” to the book Green Growth that Works, published by Island Press in 2019, and he recently co-authored the paper “Assessing the Influence of Urban Greenness on Hydrology from Satellite Remote Sensing,” published in Science and the Total Environment in 2022.
Craig holds a BA with distinction from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an MS from Columbia University.
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