2020 CFA Incubator

HORUS - A boat sharing marketplace for diving tour operators

Conictus (Egypt, Global)

This project will establish a dive boat sharing marketplace enabling a per seat booking instead of sending dive boats out with 25% utilization capacity. The result of boat sharing would include cutting operation costs, reducing the industry’s carbon footprint and reducing the impact of boat moorings on the reef.  Monetization is based on a SaaS Model and this offering will be the initial tool for a larger dive tourism interface application that improves the diver’s experience and facilitates a dive shop’s operations and profitability.

Land Restoration Exchange

Rejuvenate Umhlaba (Zimbabwe)

In Zimbabwe at least 90% of arable lands in communal areas are degraded with yields as low as 1 tonne per hectare where they could harvest at least 4 tonnes per hectare. This degradation and lack of productivity results in very poor communities. Rejuvenate Umhlaba is establishing an exchange for facilitating corporate investment and donations for land restoration.  The organization will initially target mining and other companies that have a net negative impact on the land. These companies will buy a share which entitles them to 1 hectare of land rehabilitated by credible restorers. Because the land restoration is localized, companies know where their money is invested, and they can see the work they are supporting and measure their impact on the local communities. Rejuvenate Umhlaba is currently raising USD250,000 for a pilot program to rehabilitate 100 hectares of degraded communal land supporting at least 500 smallholder farming households.

Link: https://rejuvenateumhlaba.com/

Building a conservation due diligence standard

Conservation Alpha (Global)

Biodiversity conservation struggles with significant funding shortfalls despite major global losses in biodiversity; the conservation sector needs to: a) become more efficient with existing finances; and b) develop new investment opportunities. Deploying investment capital to the conservation sector is often limited by a lack of investable projects and organizations.  Taking ill-informed investment risks may lead to ineffective and inefficient expenditure, resulting in  failed outcomes and deterring additional private and philanthropic investment. This project seeks to develop a conservation-focused due diligence standard to assess and potentially accredit organizations (such as PA Agencies) as a means of guiding and de-risking investments for a broad range of financiers from blended finance to private capital markets.  An accepted conservation due diligence standard, properly used, will allow impact investors, corporates, DFIs and donors to better understand and rationalize trade-offs in their decisions. Our multi-disciplinary project team brings due diligence best practices drawn from the conservation, investment banking, management consultancy, and ESG sectors, as well as experiences from launching a Conservation Impact Bond. Through the CFA Incubator, Conservation Alpha (www.conservationalpha.com) will work with our partners to develop an implementation plan (to inform the next product development stage) including the framework template for a conservation-focused due diligence standard based on a rigorous market survey

Digital Tree Wallet Mechanism

Greenstand (Global)

A struggling mother, living below the poverty line in Sub-Saharan Africa with few opportunities for income, has now found a way to support her family through reforesting biologically depleted landscapes. In the past, she had been surviving on a small cornfield; now, she has substantially increased her income by growing native forests and using a mobile app to track trees that she plants and grows. Greenstand is launching a wallet system to integrate with its existing Treetracker app that allows entities (businesses, organizations, or individuals) to purchase and trade the environmental services in the form of digital tokens provided by trees. This effort empowers people of severely impoverished regions to rebuild degraded landscapes, restore nature, build ecological wealth, and increase economic stability with a focus on areas of degraded landscapes and buffer zones around nature reserves and biodiversity hotspots.

Link: https://greenstand.org/home

Retrieving ghost fishing gear in Mexico: a circular economy solution to plastic pollution

Mexico

More than 640,000 metric tons of ghost fishing gear enter our oceans each year, making up 10 per cent of all plastic waste in the marine environment. At the same time, nylon manufacturers such as Aquafil and others have developed technology that can transform ghost fishing gear into regenerated nylon (e.g. Econyl).  We propose to establish a nation-wide ghost gear retrieval program in Mexico funded with the proceeds generated from the sale of the retrieved derelict fishing gear to plastic recycling companies. To achieve this, we will establish a hybrid non-profit / social enterprise to implement the ghost fishing gear retrieval projects and sale of ghost fishing gear and other waste materials. Our long-term goal is to scale up this project to other plastic products and ultimately establish a processing facility to transform marine waste plastics in Mexico.

Tax-free Tourism for Protected Area Finance

WWF-US (Chile)

While the growth of protected area systems has accelerated worldwide in recent years, government funding has lagged and many protected areas remain unmanaged or poorly managed.  Private Conservation Trust Funds (CTFs) can be key institutions for addressing the funding gap and stimulating a complementary increase in direct public funding by leveraging innovative conservation finance mechanisms, international assistance, and donations.  In this project, a governmental scheme is proposed to refund Value-Added Taxes (VAT) paid by international travelers on tourism services whereby a Conservation Trust Fund (CTF) is authorized to affect the refund transaction and, as part of the process, deduct fees for (1) its operational costs, and for (2) financial support to protected areas.  Through this scheme the government designates the CTF to serve as an intermediary between national tax authorities and international travelers to refund the VAT paid on in-country tourism services (hotels, restaurants, tours, car rentals, etc.).  As part of the transaction, the fund would deduct a fee to support protected areas, as well as the operational costs of the CTF. For a country with around 5 million international visitors per year and a 20% VAT rate, it is estimated that the “Tax-free Tourism for Protected Area Finance” concept would raise about US$ 100 million per year.  A cost-benefit analysis, communications plan, and promotional materials are useful tools for informing lobbying efforts for inclusion of this financial mechanism in relevant tax legislation and/or regulations.

Carbon Yield Fund

Carbon Yield (USA)

Carbon Yield envisions an agricultural economy where farmers are sustained by how well they steward working lands. The economics of commodity agriculture have been obliterated by degraded soil, low crop prices, and increasing input costs. Farmers are desperate for alternative models. At the same time, we cannot merely address climate change by slowing emissions, we need scalable solutions that return carbon to the land where it originated. Carbon Yield facilitates access to finance for farmers that support the adoption of profitable, organic practices and compensate farmers for the soil carbon drawn down within a regenerative growing system.

PACE4Nature

Possible Planet (USA)

The concept, PACE4Nature, is based on an existing successful model, Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE). PACE was heralded as one the top 20 world-changing idea of the 21st century, with over $6 billion in private capital already invested in solar, energy efficiency and resiliency measures in buildings in the US.  PACE4Nature will be built around projects that generate predictable revenues sufficient to cover loan payments – ideally projects that are cashflow positive from the start. The project will survey the existing attempts to apply PACE-like concepts to conservation, develop illustrative or actual scalable models with input from stakeholders, and identify challenges that need to be resolved, including potential legislative issues. The outcome will be identification and in some cases, detailed profiles, of candidate projects, properties, lenders and conditions conducive to using PACE and PACE-like structures to regenerate ecosystems.

Link: https://possibleplanet.org/

Biodiversity outcomes in hands of coastal communities in Chile

Capital Azul (Chile)

Chile is among the ten most underfunded countries for biodiversity conservation and less than 1% of its vast coastline is formally protected. Leveraging small-scale fishing organizations’ ability to legally hold exclusive access rights to near shore areas, and anticipating a pending biodiversity offset policy, Capital Azul is establishing voluntary marine coastal reserves that are:

1) community enforced

2) independently certified and monitored

3) providing benefits to the community

4) potentially financed with biodiversity offsets and other conservation finance mechanisms.

This project will explore the potential long-term financing options for these locally-managed marine refuges in coastal Chile.

Link: https://capitalazul.com/

Blue Buyout Fund

Blue Buyout Fund

IUCN – Conservation Capital (Africa)

Many investors state that they would like to invest more capital in nature based instruments and companies but generally agree that one of the main issues is the lack of bankable projects.  This is especially true for blue economy investments. Venture capital and other early stage investors are known to be some of the best placed actors to structure and develop a sector by providing the necessary equity investments as well as the indispensable expertise, experience and network to make pilot projects become thriving and successful businesses.  Encouraging more early stage venture funding in the blue economy would greatly increase the options for larger investments in the future.  One barrier to increased venture funding is the lack of adequate exit opportunities (as in many countries in Africa). In this project, IUCN and Conservation Capital (CC) propose the development of a Blue Buyout Fund (BBF), dedicated to enhance the development of blue and inclusive entrepreneurial businesses in Africa by catalyzing venture capital investments and providing technical assistance support.  The Blue Buyout Fund is intended to respond to the challenges described above by providing potential exit opportunities to venture investors, therefore reducing the barriers to invest into the sustainable blue economy sector and encouraging more experimentation.