North America CFA Members and Partners Event - December 12th, 2018
The CFA held a Members and Partners meeting in North America at World Wildlife Fund’s offices in Washington DC on October 12th. The meeting and networking event was a great opportunity to share the CFA’s activities and strategy as well as hear from a range of members and partners and build on the CFA’s outreach. This event comes as part of our effort to energize the network and build momentum for the wide range of conservation finance initiatives we are all working on.
In addition to a presentation from the CFA Executive Director (that can be found here) we heard from a range of partners including Melissa Moye who spoke about WWF’s many conservation finance initiatives including their Project Finance for Permanence (PFP) which recently closed on the Bhutan for Lifeproject. Chris Stone and Romas Garbaliauskas from Conservation International respectively shared their efforts to support over 30 Conservation Trust Funds (CTFs) through the Global Conservation Fund and implement a range of innovative approaches to engage the private sector in conservation finance – in part through the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation (CPIC). Frank Hawkins of IUCN presented a detailed overview of CPIC’s initiatives including work on blueprints to replicate and scale private investments in conservation. Forest Trends and Ecosystem Marketplace were represented by Kelly Hamrick and Michael Jenkins who shared their work on tracking market mechanisms for conservation and a publication last year on The State of Private Investment in Conservation. Katy Mathias of the Wildlife Conservation Society explained a range of activities being implemented by WCS including work on biodiversity offsets, coral reef finance, and the Conservation Trust Investment Survey(CTIS) that is a collaborative annual report on CTF investment strategies and results. Active discussions and questions continued through a short networking session. As well, the Protected Areas Finance Working Group was officially relaunched by Charles Besancon as Chair.