In this article, Tracey Cumming, Technical Advisor at the UNDP’s Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN), argues that safeguarding nature requires more than just conservation spending - and explores how the economic rules of the game must be transformed to properly incentivise sustainability.
Closing the Gap: Financing and Resourcing of Protected and Conserved Areas in Eastern and Southern Africa
This report aims to provide an overview of the current status of protected area finance in the Southern and Eastern African region, covering 24 countries, to understand the extent of the challenge. The report also outlines the different innovative finance mechanisms that might be used to help decrease the funding gap. This report is meant to support protected area authorities and governments in understanding mechanisms for increasing funding for conservation management and to help the International Union for the Conservation of Nature design effective programmes that will help mitigate funding gaps and sustainability challenges for protected areas in Africa and support the capacity development of protected area managers.
Community-based Aquaculture Development and Marine Protection in Zanzibar
This solution addresses poverty reduction in Zanzibar for its coastal communities through a more sustainable management of their natural resources, additional income, and consequently, better quality of life. The approach of implementing ecological aqua farming of bath sponges with women in coastal communites promotes healthy economic growth, reduces environmental pressure and threats to marine life and othernatural wildlife, improves public health and strenghtens the economic and social status of women.
IUCN: COVID-19 and Protected and Conserved Areas
This special Editorial in PARKS Journal today provides a snapshot of how protected and conserved areas around the world are being impacted by COVID-19. For many protected and conserved areas, negative impacts on management capacity, budgets and effectiveness are significant, as are impacts on the livelihoods of communities living in and around these areas. The Editorial provides a commentary on how effectively and equitably managed systems of protected and conserved areas can be part of the response to the pandemic that both lessens the chance of a recurrence of similar events and builds a more sustainable future for people and nature.
Read more (Click on the link "Editorial Essay: COVID-19 and protected and conserved areas" to download the PDF)
Shaping Indonesia's Environmental Funding Landscape
How to Mobilize Private Investment At Scale in Blended Finance
In this report, Convergence, DFID and stakeholders, re-visit Convergence’s 2018 Report: Who is the Private Sector? Convergence has convened a group of over 20 leading global privates sector investors to reflect on the current state of blended finance to identify key recommendations needed to accelerate the market.Strengthening Urban-Rural Connections: 20 Ways Cities and Water Utilities Can Pay for Water Quality Improvements on Farms
Towards Sustainable Land Use: Aligning Biodiversity, Climate and Food Policies
Land use is central to many of the environmental and socio-economic issues facing society today. This OECD report examines on-going challenges for aligning land-use policy with climate, biodiversity and food objectives, and the opportunities to enhance the sustainability of land-use systems. It looks at six countries – Brazil, France, Indonesia, Ireland, Mexico and New Zealand – with relatively large agricultural and forestry sectors and associated greenhouse gas emissions, many of which also host globally important biodiversity. Drawing on these countries’ relevant national strategies and plans, institutional co-ordination and policy instruments, the report provides good practice insights on how to better align land use decision-making processes and to achieve stronger coherence between land use, climate, ecosystems and food objectives.A Comprehensive Overview of Global Biodiversity Finance
OECD“Implementing an effective post-2020 global biodiversity framework will demand ambitious and widespread use of biodiversity policy instruments, and other measures, to promote sustainable patterns of production and consumption. It will also require governments and the private sector to scale up biodiversity finance and reduce finance flows that harm biodiversity. While it is clear that biodiversity finance must be increased, little information has been available on recent biodiversity expenditure. Building on OECD’s 2019 report to the G7 Environment Ministers on “Biodiversity: Finance and the Business and Economic Case for Action”, which included a preliminary update on global biodiversity finance flows, this report aims to address this information gap by providing a more comprehensive overview and an aggregate estimate of global biodiversity finance. The report also provides an overview of government support potentially harmful to biodiversity, and offers recommendations for improving the assessment, tracking and reporting of biodiversity finance”Blue Infrastructure Finance: A New Approach Integrating Nature-based Solutions for Coastal Resilience
IUCNAll coastal and marine ecosystems are critical to human well-being and global biodiversity. Mangroves, coral reefs, and seagrass beds are examples of these. But urban and rural infrastructure investments are having a heavy negative impact on these sytems, and it is increasing over time.To find out how to turn this around, IUCN brought together a group of leading experts – with finance, conservation and engineering backgrounds – to explore how infrastructure finance and Nature-based Solutions (NbS) can work hand in hand to make infrastructure investments better, more durable, and financially more attractive.Investing in Impact on the Ground - Eco.Business Fund Impact Report 2018
Eco.Business FundRead the eco.business Fund’s first Impact Report, “Investing in Impact on the Ground.” It provides an in-depth look into the progress the eco.business Fund has made since inception and presents the fund’s approach to making a real difference for people and the planet. In this report you will learn more about what impact the eco.business Fund creates: how the fund promotes change in financial institutions’ practices; how it supports its end borrowers in integrating sustainable practices into their production processes, and how the fund facilitates an enabling environment for a greener economy.COMBO - Reducing Infrastructure Impacts on Biodiversity
Wildlife Conservation Society, Forest Trends, Biotope“Over the past four years, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), together with its partners Forest Trends and Biotope, have been operating an innovative program called Conservation, Impact Mitigation and Biodiversity Offsets (COMBO) in Africa. The programs overarching aim is as simple as it is ambitious: to reconcile economic development with the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services.”Investing in Nature - Private Finance for Nature-based Resilience
“The Nature Conservancy joined forces with Environmental Finance to better understand what major investors are looking for, what obstacles they face and what can be done to help them scale up investments in projects that protect or enhance natural capital. They conducted a global survey of asset owners, asset managers and financial intermediaries (including banks, investment advisors, consultancies, government agencies and NGOs) and attracted responses from 168 institutions. This was complemented by 23 one-to-one interviews.”
Conservation Finance: Can Banks Embrace Natural Capital?
“Climate is no longer the only risk in town: thanks to a loud call from the scientific community, nature has finally been given a seat at the table with finance ministers, regulators and central bank governors.
Degradation of natural capital through human activity has brought us to a tipping point. The risks are multiple and varied, from precipitous declines in economic growth to the uncertain future of our species. All sectors of society are being called on to go ‘beyond carbon’ and reduce their negative impact on the natural environment, finding solutions that regenerate natural resources. How can financial institutions best be of service? By examining their balance-sheet exposure to nature-related risks and by channelling finance to businesses and projects that are restoring natural resources. They have the full support of the scientific community.”
Behavior Change For Nature: A Behavioral Science Toolkit for Practitioners
“We are fortunate to live in a world filled with both an abundance and diversity of life. Yet the growing scale and impact of human behaviour pose a grave risk to the natural world in irreversible ways. Deforestation, overfishing, ocean plastics, biodiversity loss, and climate change are increasingly threatening the livelihoods, health, and well-being of people as well as the species and places we know and love.
Past and current efforts in facing these challenges have tended to rely on a standard toolbox that enacts regulations, provides financial incentives or disincentives, and raises awareness about the dire consequences of our actions. These tools have merit – and are sometimes the most effective approaches we have. But oftentimes enforcement is difficult or ineffectual, payments for conservation outcomes can backfire, and information or education efforts come up against our biases, denial and wishful thinking. Behavioural science can provide a far more realistic understanding of what works, in the real world.
In this report, co-written by the Behavioural Insights Team and the conservation charity Rare, we expand the conventional toolkit and argue for a greater focus on how our cognitive biases, emotions, social networks, and decision-making environments all impact our behaviours and choices. We provide 15 concrete tools for conservation and sustainability practitioners, and the methodologies for putting them into practice, to achieve (and evaluate) real change.”
Tracking Economic Instruments and Finance for Biodiversity
“The adoption of the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 under the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, committed the international community to a set of ambitious goals on ‘living in harmony with nature’. This requires immediate and ambitious action to protect both life below water and life on land, so as to conserve and sustainably use biodiversity and ecosystem services.
Economic instruments, such as taxes, fees and charges, tradable permits, payments for ecosystem services schemes, and environmentally-motivated subsidies, provide signals to both producers and consumers to behave in a more environmentally-sustainable way. These instruments also provide continuous incentives to achieve objectives in a more cost-effective manner, and most are also able to mobilise finance and/or generate revenue. Economic instruments are the so-called “positive incentives” embedded in the 2011-2020 Aichi Biodiversity Targets, notably Target 3.
The OECD Environmental Policy Committee (EPOC), through its unique database of Policy Instruments for the Environment (PINE), collects quantitative and qualitative information on policy instruments, in more than 80 countries worldwide. This brochure presents statistics on the biodiversity-relevant economic instruments and the finance they mobilise, based on currently available data in PINE. The data are relevant to monitoring progress towards Aichi Biodiversity Target 3 (on incentives), Target 20 (on resource mobilisation) as well as Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) Target 15.a. on finance.”
Mainstreaming Blue Carbon to Finance Coastal Resilience
“The contribution of marine and coastal ecosystems in carbon sequestration, or “blue carbon,” has only recently begun to gain traction in market-based ecosystem management discussions.
At present, existing methods of measuring and monitoring carbon offsets are geared towards terrestrial ecosystems, and do not account for the carbon stored in coastal, marine or wetland soils and biomass.
There are a number of mechanisms in place to facilitate investment in terrestrial carbon through regulatory markets which could be adapted to include blue carbon.”
Photo: Rick Shwartz // CC BY-NC 2.0
Conserving Mangroves, a Lifeline for the World
“The roots of a mangrove tree are like veins. They rise up and plunge down into the salty waters of Cispatá Bay in Córdoba, Colombia, along the coast of the Caribbean Sea, sprawling in every direction. A series of channels have formed an arterial highway connecting to the Sinú River, providing single-lane access into and out of the mangroves where fishermen and loggers begin their day’s work…”
Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis engulfing Nature matters for Business and the Economy
“It is not surprising that the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risks Report (GRR), through its comprehensive risks perception survey, ranks biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as one of the top five risks in terms of likelihood and impact in the coming 10 years. Yet general confusion persists on what amount of nature loss has occurred, why it relates to human prosperity and how to confront its loss in a practical manner, especially in the business world. Following on the heels of the 2020 GRR, this report provides a deep dive into how nature loss is material to businesses in all industry sectors and makes a clear argument for nature-related risks to be regularly identified, assessed and disclosed by business – as is now increasingly the case for climate change risks. This will help prevent risk mispricing and inaccurate capital buffers, as well as guiding action to mitigate and adapt business activities that degrade and destroy nature.”
Paying for Stewardship: A Western Landowners Guide to Conservation Finance
Restoring habitat, water courses, and soils have costs, and unfortunately, mainstream agricultural policy passes them not to taxpayers or consumers, but to farmers and ranchers.
This guide presents some ways landowners can earn compensation for their stewardship efforts directly or indirectly—schemes sometimes referred to as payments for ecosystem services, ecosystem services markets, or conservation finance. It goes beyond description to provide illustrative case studies of these strategies at work.