• South Africa's First Sustainable Landscape Finance Coalition
• 2018-2019 Large Landscape Peer Learning Initiative
• Privately Protected Areas at the 3rd Latin America and Caribbean Protected Areas Congress
• Australia's Conservation Finance Intensive 2019
• ELCN Hosts High Nature Value Farming Workshop
• Call for Applications: 2020 Conservation Leadership Programme Conservation Awards
• Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Publishes New Book: Design with Nature Now
• Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology Develops Sample Conservation Area List Project
• RS Group Launches US$3 Million Asia Natural Capital Design Funding Window
• Upcoming Events

Wilderness Foundation Africa and WWF South Africa Launch South Africa’s First Sustainable Landscape Finance Coalition
By Candice Stevens, Innovative Finance Lead, WFA

In South Africa, as is the case in many places around the globe, conservationists are challenged by a lack of sustainable finance and continue to look for innovative ways to support environmental efforts. To this end, WWF South Africa and Wilderness Foundation Africa have launched South Africa’s first Sustainable Landscape Finance Coalition. Bringing together experts on policy and finance, industry leaders and conservation practitioners, this Coalition “aims to advance the development and implementation of innovative finance solutions to support the delivery of optimal landscape conservation and the maintenance of ecological infrastructure; as well as provide enduring benefits for South Africa’s biodiversity, people and the economy.” The Coalition plans to create spaces for discussion and engagement with events like the Innovation Hub, a quarterly event which will bring together public, private, and civic sector voices to discuss and advance conservation finance in South Africa.  Innovations in conservation finance have the potential to expand the opportunities, rate, and national engagement in conservation, and this coalition aims to create space for those innovations to be imagined. To learn more about the Coalition, please contact Candice Stevens at Candice@wfa.africa.

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ILCN Wraps 2018-19 Large Landscape Peer Learning Initiative

The ILCN has concluded the first cohort of the Large Landscape Peer Learning Initiative (LLPLI). This Initiative brought together four large landscape conservation project groups to facilitate the exchange of ideas and build strategies for the initiatives moving forward. The participating landscape initiatives included: The Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve, the El Boldo to Cantillana Corridor, the Ruta de los Parques, and the Appalachian Trail Landscape Partnership. These groups shared their initiatives, strategies, challenges, and experience in facilitating large landscape conservation.  The group met several times, visiting sites in each project region, including Pepperwood Reserve in Sonoma County, California; El Boldo Park in Zapallar, Chile; Pumalin National Park in Chilean Patagonia; and protected properties near the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Park in Woodstock, VT. Topics were varied and broad, and included project funding, management, policy, and stewardship of large landscape conservation projects. Ultimately, participants came away with initiatives strengthened, with plans to move forward, address challenges, and embrace opportunities in their regions. Each group constructed and presented a Case Statement outlining their project’s history, current context, challenges, and opportunities. Executive summaries of each initiative’s Case Statement were assembled by LLPLI Staff and will be available upon request in early 2020.

Privately Protected Areas Represented at the 3rd Latin America and Caribbean Protected Areas Congress

The Third Latin America and Caribbean Protected Areas Congress (CAPLAC), convened in Lima, Peru from 14-17 October 2019. Organized by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) under the theme “Solutions for welfare and sustainable development”, the event brought together hundreds of organizations and governments from the region to discuss strategies for advancing the effective implementation of protected areas.
 
Privately protected areas (PPAs) were well-represented at the event. The day preceding the Congress, the IUCN World Commission on Protected Areas (IUCN-WCPA) Specialist Group on Privately Protected Areas and Nature Stewardship organized a one-day training or ‘Conservation Campus’ based on the IUCN Guidelines for Privately Protected Areas. The training, which was fully subscribed, was made possible by BfN, the German Agency for Nature Conservation, with local support from Sociedad Peruana de Derecho Ambiental.
 
Over the course of CAPLAC, highlights related to PPAs included sessions and presentations providing regional, national, and local perspectives on private land conservation in Latin America and the Caribbean. Pedro Solano and Brent Mitchell of the IUCN PPA Specialist Group hosted a two-hour workshop on Privately Protected Areas, at which they launched the Spanish version of the IUCN Guidelines for PPAs, as well as a session on Privately Protected Areas – Challenges and opportunities in Latin America. Marc Hoogeslag, Senior Expert on Nature Conservation at the IUCN, spoke about the added value and impact of private protected areas. Maria Paula Bertolini of Fundación Temaikèn in Argentina presented on capacity building in the management of a privately protected area.
 
Several presentations highlighted specific country and case examples from which the broader private and civic land conservation community can draw insights: Jose Carlos Nieto Navarrete of Peru shared reflections from a protected area system on mostly private lands. Lina Marea Caro described the contribution of private areas in the conservation of ecosystems in Colombia. Berenice Diaz provided a summary of civil society efforts to reach the UN Aichi biodiversity targets in Mexico, and Constanza Pinochet imparted her experience with collaborative networks for voluntary conservation in Chile. Many other sessions and presentations touched in whole or in part on privately protected areas, raising awareness and understanding of the role and importance of private land conservation. For a full view of the speakers and topics covered, see the final agenda for the Congress.

Australia Hosts 2019 Conservation Finance Intensive
By Marnie Lassen, Conservation Markets Manager, Trust for Nature

What’s a capital stack? How do you build a blended conservation finance deal? These were the issues tackled in Australia’s second Australian Conservation Finance Intensive workshop, run by Trust for Nature on behalf of the Australian Land Conservation Alliance in October 2019.
The workshop built on the first Conservation Finance Intensive run in 2018, which presented a ‘tasting platter’ of all the different mechanisms that can be used to finance private land conservation. The 2018 workshop’s content was based on a comprehensive Conservation Finance Scoping Paper
Under this next phase, the focus narrowed to how to build a blended conservation finance deal. Trust for Nature prepared a Blended Conservation Reference Guide to provide a framework for participants in advance of the workshop.

The speakers brought a wealth of knowledge to the workshop. Our two speakers from the US (Carl Palmer and Henry Tepper) were able to speak to a wide range of specific financings that had been undertaken there – from very large forestry conservation acquisitions to smaller farm-scale opportunities. Then through the lens of one of our Australian speakers (Jane Hutchinson), attendees were shown how these same principles have been applied in the Australian context in a large-scale blended finance project in New South Wales.  

On behalf of its national alliance, Trust for Nature plans to continue the national conversation on conservation finance. In so doing, Trust for Nature hopes to build and strengthen the informal network of conservation finance practitioners developing in Australia.

ELCN Convenes High Nature Value (HNV) Farming Workshop
By Tilmann Disselhoff, Project Coordinator, European Land Conservation Network - LIFE ELCN

On October 25, the ELCN held a seminar on High-Nature Value Farming at the 2019 Burren Winterage School in Ireland. At the seminar, participants from European countries as diverse as Iceland, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia exchanged ideas and experience on how to best design agricultural funding programs that empower and support farmers willing to engage in land conservation. It became clear that community engagement, peer recognition, administrative flexibility and a focus on results instead of measures are key ingredients of successful programs. A newly founded EU-wide network on results-based agricultural payment schemes will connect pioneer approaches such as the one developed in the Burren and support their replication elsewhere. For question, please contact the coordinator of the ELCN, Tilmann Disselhoff (tilmann.disselhoff@elcn.eu).

Call for Applications: 2020 Conservation Leadership Programme (CLP) Conservation Awards
By Sherilyn Bos, Programme Officer, Capacity Development, BirdLife International

Do you know of any early-career conservationists who need funding to support their work conserving the natural world?

The Conservation Leadership Programme (CLP) is now accepting applications for 2020 Conservation Awards. Future Conservationist Awards are worth $15,000 each and support projects in low- and middle-income countries and some high-income islands in the Caribbean and Pacific. Funding will enable early-career conservationists to conduct scientific research, encourage and promote pro-conservation attitudes and deliver tangible results to better conserve and manage the natural world. Each project must have at least three members and all team members must have less than five years of paid conservation experience. Projects can last 3-12 months and must focus on a threatened species. In addition to project funding, CLP will invite one member of each award-winning team to their international training course where they will gain a range of conservation management and leadership skills as well as build their professional network.

The application deadline is November 24, 2019.

Read CLP’s full eligibility criteria and access the application form here. Contact clp@birdlife.org with any questions. 

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Publishes New Book: Design with Nature Now

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Ian McHarg’s seminal book, Design with Nature, the Lincoln Institute partnered with the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design on a new volume that showcases some of the most advanced ecological design projects in the world today. Featuring vivid color images, Design with Nature Now prepares practitioners to contend with climate change and other 21st-century challenges. The book is available on the Lincoln Institute website for 80.00 USD.

"Like Ian McHarg's classic Design with Nature, this beautiful and fulsome reprise of his earlier work inspires us with its sheer virtuosity. Yes, it looks back at the pioneering work of McHarg but, much more, it elucidates contemporary challenges with boldness and precision. Human destruction and climate change are front and center, but so is dynamic planning and deep understanding of the places we inhabit and the ecological threats they face. A true manual for spaceship Earth!”
— Jerry Brown, Former four-term Governor, California

Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology Develops Sample Conservation Area List Project
By Joe Beeken, Durrell Institute for Conservation and Ecology (DICE), University of Kent

Every country that is a signatory to the Convention on Biological Diversity has committed to Aichi Target 11, which states that by 2020 at least 17% of terrestrial areas should be conserved through Protected Areas (PAs) and Other Effective area-based Conservation Measures (OECMs). Protected Areas are a well-established tool for preventing biodiversity loss, and their extent is monitored through the World Database on Protected Areas (WDPA) run by UNEP-WCMC. The importance of OECMs has been recognized much more recently, so the global extent of these areas is not known. To overcome this issue the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology (DICE) at the University of Kent has developed the Sample Conservation Area List project.

 
This DICE project aims to produce a global estimate of the coverage of terrestrial conservation areas, based on data from 25 regionally representative countries. As part of this, they are contacting experts in each of the sample countries and asking them to share their knowledge and datasets on existing OECMs and “potential OECMs”, i.e. areas with OECM-like characteristics that have not yet been classified as such. They would also like these experts to let them know if the WDPA needs an update for their country. These data will be used to produce a global estimate only, so will not be reported at the country level.
 
So, they are calling all area-based conservation experts from the 25 countries and territories listed below. If you have datasets and knowledge on PAs, OECMs or potential OECMs then they would be grateful for your help and advice, so please contact Joe Beeken at J.Beeken@kent.ac.uk
 
25 countries and territories in the DICE Project:
1.           Argentina
2.           Australia
3.           Brazil
4.           China
5.           Democratic Republic of Congo
6.           Dominican Republic
7.           France
8.           French Polynesia
9.           Greenland
10.         India
11.         Indonesia
12.         Italy
13.         Kazakhstan
14.         Kiribati
15.         Mali
16.         Mexico
17.         Papua New Guinea
18.         Russian Federation
19.         Saudi Arabia
20.         South Africa
21.         South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands
22.         Sudan
23.         Sweden
24.         Tanzania
25.         USA

RS Group Launches US$3 Million Asia Natural Capital Design Funding Window
By Yuni Choi, Director of Investments, RS Group

RS Group is excited to announce the launch of a US$3 Million Asia Natural Capital Design Funding Window, together with Convergence Blended Finance, to fund innovative and catalytic blended finance solutions focused on natural capital in Asia. Grants will be awarded in amounts ranging from US$50,000 to US$500,000, supporting feasibility study or proof of concept funding for blended finance solutions.
 
The Window aims to support practitioners who are finding new ways to enhance and protect the world’s stocks of natural assets, including water, land, soil, air, plants, and animals, via the design and launch of blended finance solutions focused on natural capital in Asia. These solutions will directly support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and could contribute to reducing the degradation of ecosystems (e.g. deforestation), mitigating and adapting to climate change, reducing unsustainable use of land and oceans, protecting biodiversity, and providing a fair and sustainable living to local communities in ecologically critical areas.
  
You can find out more about this exciting new opportunity at Convergence's designated portal for this Window: https://www.convergence.finance/design-funding. Please note Convergence is the manager of this Window, and all applications and inquiries should be directed either to the above website, or by email at design.funding@convergence.finance.

"From 28 to 30 November, Luxembourg will host a ground-breaking conference exploring the scope for sustainable finance in a world of new challenges and unprecedented opportunities. The events, under the theme of “Breakthroughs in Sustainable Finance”, will delve into the practical implications of key developments such as sustainable insurance, impact-based financing and landscape protection in agribusiness supply chains."

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UN Climate Change Conference COP 25
December 2-13, 2019
Tentatively in Madrid, Spain
 
"The twenty-fifth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 25), the fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 15), and the second session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA 2) will be held at IFEMA - Feria de Madrid in Madrid, Spain, from 2 to 13 December 2019. SBSTA 51/ SBI 51 will take place 2-9 December 2019.
The conference will take place under the Presidency of the Government of Chile and will be held with logistical support from the Government of Spain. The President-designate for the conference is Ms. Carolina Schmidt, Minister of Environment of Chile."
  
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