The guide presents innovative strategies that can help fund the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as well as adaptive measures for climate-vulnerable communities around the world.
What We're Reading: Conserving mangroves, a lifeline for the world
From Apple
“Through Apple’s Earth Day 2018 Give Back campaign, the company has partnered with Conservation International to protect a 27,000 acre mangrove forest in Cispatá Bay on the Caribbean coast of Colombia.”
The full article is available in the Apple Newsroom.
What We're Reading: Mainstreaming Blue Carbon to Finance Coastal Resilience
From the Conservation Finance Network
“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.”
The full article is available on the Conservation Finance Network website.
What We're Reading - Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy
From World Economic Forum:
“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.”
What We're Reading: COMBO - Reducing Infrastructure Impacts on Biodiversity
By Hugo Costa, Hugo Rainey & Ray Victurine | December 16, 2019
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.
To learn more about this project please view the full article here.
What We're Reading: 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.
The full article is available from the Nature Conservancy here.
What We're Reading: "Conservation Finance - Can banks embrace natural capital?"
From Euromoney:
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.
Full article: https://www.euromoney.com/article/b1hh1rccjthqmd/conservation-finance-can-banks-embrace-natural-capital?copyrightInfo=true
What We're Reading: Behavior Change For Nature: A Behavioral Science Toolkit for Practitioners
From Behavioral Insights Team:
“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.”
What We're Reading: Tracking Economic Instruments and Finance for Biodiversity
The summary for this innovative report from OECD is as follows:
“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.”