How the Climate Investment Funds can help save nature

The recent Geneva gathering of global leaders has made positive advances in a deal to save nature. The Climate Investment Funds (CIF)’ Nature, People & Climate (NPC) program is uniquely placed to help.

Set against the backdrop of stark assessments from the scientific community about the scale of biodiversity losses, world governments convened at the UN Environment Program’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), with the aim of refining the draft of a ‘Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) – which seeks to guide collective action and sets targets to protect our natural capital through to 2050.

The scope of the GBF suggests a clear role for the CIF model of delivering flexible, secure, highly concessional climate finance and co-funding to rapidly scale up the actions called for in the GBF. Meanwhile, the design of its NPC program makes it uniquely placed to help meet the draft objectives…

A CBD press release started that the overarching goals of the draft framework — to protect the elements of biodiversity at all levels, sustainability, and human well-being in the use of biodiversity, and the equitable sharing of benefits from the use of biodiversity — were reaffirmed in Geneva.

These goals align with the design of the NPC…

• The NPC ensures the fairness stipulated in the GBF because it empowers those who will shoulder the biggest losses, indigenous peoples, to lead and benefit from climate change solutions.
• Similarly, the NPC is built to preserve biodiversity. By recognizing the interdependency between land use, climate change and people it aims to manage these complex relationships and balance the trade-offs to protect, restore and connect a diversity of ecosystems across multiple landscapes and land uses. The benefits include biodiversity conservation while sustainably supporting livelihoods and communities.

The Geneva gathering, the fourth such meeting, was an important staging post, (another is planned in Nairobi in June) before part two of the COP15 of the UN Convention on Biodiversity in China, where the final draft of the GBF must be approved and adopted.

Until then, the CIF are poised and ready to contribute their experience and expertise to help achieve the finalized targets of the framework.