Investing in Nature for People and the Planet: Innovative Financing for Landscape Restoration, Biodiversity Conservation and Climate Action

Agriculture, forestry, and land use change produce almost a quarter of global GHG emissions, and agriculture, as the largest user of land and water globally, significantly impacts forests, grasslands, wetlands, and biodiversity. Unsustainable food and land use systems currently generate “hidden” environmental, health, and poverty costs estimated at almost $12 trillion per year. Major changes are needed.

Aware of these challenges, governments and private actors across the globe are taking action to slow deforestation, restore degraded lands, and establish sustainable agricultural practices through landscape approaches. Such approaches can help communities recover from the COVID crisis by providing jobs and improving livelihoods while delivering on carbon sequestration, biodiversity conservation and ecosystem services benefits such as water security and improved agriculture productivity. Financing for landscape programs is fundamental to implementing and scaling up such programs.

This session will highlight how blending finance from different sources (results-based climate finance, grants, loans, public resources and private investments) enables the integrated cross-sectoral approaches needed to deliver such programs and address sustainable landscape management issues at scale. It will highlight programs such as innovative Emissions Reduction Programs (ERPs) that are now disbursing results-based payments, growing interest in financing for nature-based solutions, initiatives to green finance, and the potential to repurpose significant public funding and incentives through subsidy reform. The session will also highlight initial findings from the Financial Task Force for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration.

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