By Steve Evans from Bangalore, India (Flickr) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
This article was originally published on WWF.
“The Government of Mozambique is setting up a national Natural Capital Programme, one of the first in Africa, in a pioneering effort to put Resilient Ecological Infrastructure Networks on the map as legally protected assets for food, water, energy and climate security.
The African Development Bank and WWF have partnered with the government in this ambitious mission along with collaborators from the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research; the Natural Capital Project; Columbia University; Third Way Africa (impact investors); Seedstars (a global start-up platform); and Standard Bank. Globally, the Green Growth Knowledge Platform’s multi-agency Working Group on Natural Capital is catalysing the sharing of experience gained by pioneers like Mozambique, Myanmar, China, and the Arctic; a clear lesson from these initiatives is the need for multiple institutional champions and more than one government cycle to put policy in place.
Leaders from private and public sector will be presenting the latest learning and developments in natural capital investment and planning approaches at the Natural Capital Symposium, taking place March 19th-22nd, 2018 at Stanford University, USA.
Three actions to scale-up investments in ecological infrastructure:
- Create financial incentives: position ecological infrastructure as investment-ready assets and reward companies, farmers and communities for their management. Investments in forests by Water Funds, with Africa’s first launched during 2017 in Nairobi, is a promising model for water systems. Building the enabling environment — including policy and subsidy reforms — and adapting this model to fishery nurseries and soils could enable entrepreneurs like Carolina to grow their businesses.
- Establish trust funds: tax extractive industries to finance ecological infrastructure trust funds that pay community stewards for restoration and management. The proposal by Norway’s US $1 trillion wealth fund to drop oil and gas stocks, the European Investment Bank’s Natural Capital Financing Facility and GEF-7’s entry point on Natural Capital provide opportunities to explore this further.
- Set targets to harness private finance: promote blended finance vehicles and women/youth entrepreneurs to accelerate the flow of funds to ecological infrastructure vital to delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 and beyond. The Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation is putting an edge on the financial potential and mechanisms to scale-up investments in ecological infrastructure…”
Read on at: WWF.
