Conservation Finance

This global survey provides an overview of conservation finance and explores a range of different approaches from around the world. Experts from the United States, Australia and South Africa share the regionally-unique political, social, and economic opportunities and challenges they have faced. Framed by the aggregate experience of practitioners, the session gives attendees a distilled understanding of creative solutions to financing land conservation and pathways for initiating, adapting, or replicating these solutions in different landscapes or jurisdictions.

This white paper released by the Conservation Finance Alliance clarifies the definition and role of conservation finance to show how important its mechanisms and strategies are for addressing the underlying causes of nature loss as well as contributing to increasing sustainable funding flows to nature conservation, provides several conceptual frameworks to facilitate an understanding of the various concepts associated with conservation financ, and presents a taxonomy of conservation finance strategies and mechanisms.

This webinar provides a programme manager’s perspective on LIFE funding opportunities for private and civic land conservation projects. Organisations that have developed projects and received EU LIFE funding share experiences and insights from the conservation practitioner and LIFE project manager perspective.

A desktop review of both international and domestic finance approaches which may be deployed and/ or expanded to support private land managers in restoring, conserving and managing Australia’s landscapes, waterways and populations of threatened species.  26 major finance approaches – spanning philanthropic giving, government financing and private investment – were assessed as to their relative deployment complexity, scalability and suitability in addressing Australia’s conservation finance gap.

BirdLife South Africa’s Fiscal Benefits Project has successfully included the very first biodiversity tax incentive for Nature Reserves in an annual tax return. Section 37D allows a landowner who has declared a Nature Reserve to deduct the value of the land from their taxable income. This was achieved on behalf of a landowner for the very first time in South Africa at the end of 2016.

In September 2016, 63 conservation practitioners, private landowners, finance experts, and elected officials from eight counties, primarily in the Americas, gathered in Chile to build on and sharpen concepts that are making, or have the potential to make, a substantial impact on conservation finance in the Western Hemisphere and beyond. This report is a compendium of the topics discussed at that gathering.