By Dr. Patrick Brown
Equal Right
In this story, Dr. Patrick Brown from Equal Right reflects on his experience at New York Climate Week, where he presented the Climate Commons Fund, an innovative financing model being developed with the Il Ngwesi Conservancy in Kenya. Combining direct cash transfers to community members with an investment fund that provides annual conservation dividends, the initiative aims to help ensure that the benefits of conservation reach the people who steward the land. Patrick also reflects on the importance of connecting global nature finance discussions with the realities and priorities of local communities.
Bridging the gap: taking the Climate Commons Fund to New York Climate Week
Thanks to a travel grant from the CFA Incubator, I spent seven days in New York for Climate Week in September with a clear purpose: to put the Climate Commons Fund in front of the people shaping nature finance, and to make the case for paying the people who steward land directly. The fund, which we are building with the Il Ngwesi Conservancy in Laikipia, Kenya, pairs a lump-sum cash transfer to all community members with an investment fund paying an annual conservation dividend, so the whole community can receive a permanent income from conservation. CFA's support, both financial and in expertise, has been central to developing the fund over the past 8 months.
My week centred around two events. On Wednesday, September 23 I organised and presented at ‘Unlocking the Power of Unconditional Cash for Climate’, a working session convened by the Cash for Conservation Group (Cool Earth, Equal Right, GiveDirectly and 100 WEEKS).
The event featured evidence from pilots in Peru, Rwanda and the Climate Commons Fund in Kenya. The following day I presented the fund in the CFA Incubator Showcase at ‘What's Next in Innovative Finance for Nature?, hosted by CFA, CPIC, IUCN and Morrison Foerster, where I had the chance to pitch the project in front of a room of nature finance experts and investors. Between the two events we now have live conversations with funders including the Adaptation Fund, Climate-KIC and the Mulago Foundation. Around them I was invited to private roundtables hosted by Open Society Foundations, the Club of Rome and the Climate Emergency Fund, and arranged meetings with the Wildlife Conservation Society, the World Climate Foundation, the International Rescue Committee and many others, which are spaces a small organisation like ours would struggle to reach without attending NYCW.
The reflection I keep coming back to is the distance between the conversations in New York and the reality on the ground in communities like Il Ngwesi. Much of the discussion in New York was about how to make real returns from nature, at a time when we have already taken far too much from it, while the communities protecting these landscapes are often far removed from the finance being designed in their name. There is no shortage of innovative models, and I'd count the Climate Commons Fund among them, but I came away convinced that the harder challenge lies in the space between - intermediaries like Equal Right need to work in both directions, building understanding and capacity within communities so they can take advantage of nature finance on their own terms, while making the case to the finance world that investing in nature is worthwhile even when the return is not a market-beating one.
That framing has sharpened how I think about our own role within the Incubator. Showcasing the fund to an audience of investors, philanthropists and conservation practitioners tested our model against people with far more experience of conservation finance than us, and gave it a visibility and credibility that would have been very hard to achieve otherwise.
I look forward to following up on the conversations started in New York to help build the pilot fund in Il Ngwesi towards our long-term ambition of around 3,000 members, and beyond that to roll it out to other communities globally. I am grateful to CFA for making the trip possible, and I hope some of the people I met in New York will be part of that journey.