Holly Fretwell

Holly Fretwell is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, where she contributes to the Markets vs. Mandates project and the Enviropreneur Fellowship Program. She is a conservation economist focused on how institutional design, property rights, and economic incentives shape environmental outcomes.

Subsidies, Permits, and Carbon Rules Shape Whether Conservation Markets Work

At a Hoover Institution session on “enviropreneurship,” Holly Fretwell and three environmental entrepreneurs argued that markets can finance conservation only when environmental benefits can be measured, paid for, and permitted. Maiky Iberkleid of RESILIFT, Grant Canary of Mast Reforestation, and Manuel Piñuela of Cultivo each described a different bottleneck: subsidized flood insurance that weakens demand for home elevation, reforestation constrained by supply chains and carbon-accounting rules, and grassland regeneration that becomes investable only after legal and underwriting risks are narrowed.

Hoover InstitutionJun 8, 202621 min read