Tracking private finance for forests: approaches and opportunities for tropical forest countries

DATE: 9 November 2021   TIME: 19:00 GMT (Glasgow local time), 20:00 CEST

Organizers: European Forest Institute (EFI) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)

VENUE: EU pavilion and online  REGISTER NOW

Context 

Finance is critical for the implementation of the land-use mitigation and adaptation actions set out in tropical countries’ NDCs. International public financing sources will not be able to provide the large-scale investment needed on their own, and private sector and domestic budgets will be required to provide the bulk of the investment effort towards sustainable development. Despite global recognition of the importance of mobilizing private finance at scale to fulfill NDC objectives and international and country pledges, monitoring of private financial flows related to forest and land-use change in tropical forest countries remains limited, due to the lack of definition of what constitutes sustainable land-use and the difficulties in accessing disaggregated information on data of private flows, due to confidentiality and market regulations. 

Mapping and tracking private investments in land-use and increasing the transparency of interests and activities impacting land‐use is definitely the next frontier in terms of understanding the landscape of land‐use finance. While there’s been significant progress in assessing and reporting private resources mobilization in sectors like energy and infrastructure, there is little information available on land-use investments and challenges are great to try to quantify those. Yet various practitioners are paving the way towards building approaches and tools that shed some light on the private sector’s role in financing NbS and sustainable land use. 

Objectives of the event 

• Understand the various dimensions of private land-use finance and challenges associated with tracking this data 

• Explore various approaches to quantify private investments at various scales and increase the transparency and accountability of global, national, and corporate climate commitments 

• Discuss the opportunity to use standardized frameworks to monitor investments in sustainable land-use   

• Discuss how tracking financial flows can support financial institutions and businesses’ efforts to scale up sustainable financing and align their investments to climate goals. 

Speakers 

• Asger Strange Olesen, Chief Climate and Ecosystems officer, Forest Stewardship Council 

• Gabriela Coser, Climate Finance Analyst, Climate Policy Initiative, Brazil 

• Ivo Mulder, Head of the Climate finance unit at UNEP 

• Adeline Dontenville, Land-use finance expert, European Forest Institute