Our planet faces huge challenges. These include degraded soils, biodiversity collapse, water shortages and a rapidly warming climate. At the same time, the world needs food – but conventional farming is a major contributor to its problems. We believe that impact investing into sustainable farming practices can help solve these problems.

In parallel to the climate crisis, rural areas in Portugal are also facing a talent drain as farming communities age and young people migrate to the cities.

Pela Terra’s Impact Strategy aims to address both of these urgent issues.

The Pela Terra Project

The Pela Terra project was conceived from a desire to address some of these fundamental challenges.

Co-founders Alex and Nathan initially bonded over a shared ambition to try to combat climate change through improving soil health. Having seen the power of impact investing elsewhere, they alighted on Portugal’s golden visa program as a vehicle to drive change.

Impact has been at the heart of the Pela Terra project ever since.

Our Impact Investment Strategy

Over the past year, we’ve worked with experts in Portugal and further afield to develop a detailed impact investing strategy. It is based around a simple theory of change, that will bring our founders’ ambitions to life.

Our goal is to offer investors looking at Portugal’s golden visa program, the opportunity to become a part of the solution to the challenges facing our world. And in doing so, to make an investment which aligns with their values and their investment goals.

Our strategy identifies six areas in which we aim to achieve positive impact through our activities. For each of these areas, we set out the actions we will take to create change in each. The report also sets out how we’ll measure the effectiveness of our impact investing, and how we’ll make sure we’re aligning with global best practice.

Our six impact areas are:

• Soil: We will work to protect, nurture and regenerate the soils on our farms to ensure they remain fertile and productive for future generations. Healthy soils are the key to producing impact across all six themes.
• Climate: Soil is a natural carbon sink. By improving soil health we’ll promote carbon sequestration, helping to combat climate change; in parallel, we work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from our operations.
• Water: Healthy soils hold more water. Through reducing the use of fertilisers and pesticides, adopting precision irrigation techniques, and carefully protecting watercourses on land we manage, we can further reduce water use and improve water quality.
• Biodiversity: Healthy soils are a prerequisite for all biodiversity. In addition to promoting soil biodiversity, we’ll set aside and manage significant areas of each property to protect and nurture a diverse range of plants, insects, birds and animals.
• Human health: Healthier soils produce more nutritious food. By producing Portuguese staples – olive oil and nuts – at scale using regenerative practices, we’ll support the transformation to food systems which work better for both people and planet.
• Society: We invest 100 per cent of our capital in Portugal, targeting rural areas where it is most needed. We work carefully across our supply chains to ensure fair conditions for all we interact with. We will continue to engage with partners and the wider investment and agriculture communities to push for changes where they are needed.

To ensure we’re aligned with global best practices, we’ve mapped each impact theme to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and use the Global Impact Investing Network’s IRIS+ system to track our progress towards creating impact.

We’re also working to align our reporting with the TNFD, TCFD, and other relevant sectoral guidelines – and are seeking relevant third-party certifications to help us benchmark and verify our impact work against international standards.

Pela Terra’s 2024 Impact Report

We have also produced an initial impact report for the Pela Terra Farmland fund, which gives more information about our strategy and which you can access below:

Read the 2024 Impact Report

This report is the first in what will become a regular series, and aims to do three main things:

1. Give some more detail on Pela Terra’s overall strategy for achieving impact;

2. Establish an initial baseline for the assets managed by the Pela Terra Farmland fund;

3. Set out an overview of how the fund will manage and develop assets in line with international best practices.

Now that we have completed the capital deployment for Pela Terra Farmland, we’ll continue to work with experts in Portugal and internationally to further develop and refine our impact measurement and reporting strategy.

We are already working to create academic and research partnerships to help us further understand how we can make better, faster progress towards achieving our impact goals.

Join Us

Social and environmental impact have always been at the heart of the Pela Terra project. We want the assets managed by our funds to serve as beacons of sustainable and regenerative good practice in Portugal and Europe more widely

We’re excited to share our impact journey, and encourage you to read the report and contact us with any questions or feedback you may have.

And if you’d like to join us by investing – you can apply here or complete the form below: