“The first thing we must understand is that nature is magnificent. But it is also complex, dynamic and nonlinear.”
This is how Rodrigo Fincheira, Senior Advisor to the Executive Vice President Climate Change Council of the Dominican Republic, described the challenge of Nature-based Solutions (NbS). He was speaking of the importance of Learning Platforms to support country-led climate and nature ambitions. Fincheira was invited with other experts to launch the Nature, People, Climate (NPC) Learning Platform, a new initiative led by the Climate Investment Funds (CIF).
The Learning Platform aims to build capacity and support governments to implement Nature-based Solutions at scale. Nature plays a critical role in the global economy, in mitigating climate change, and in supporting the livelihoods and resilience of vulnerable communities. Governments can harness nature for multiple benefits, but face challenges as NbS is complex, nuanced and very context-specific.
The NPC Learning Platform is a response to requests from several countries for knowledge exchanges on NbS. These requests were raised following the NPC program launch in June 2022 and the subsequent Expressions of Interest (EoI) process that invited country proposals aligned to the program’s aims: To tackle the multiple drivers and impacts of climate change, resulting from human activities on land resources and ecosystems services, in an integrated manner.
Demand for this approach vastly exceeded supply; the program received 48 EOIs from 55 developing countries spanning six continents and representing over two billion people. Following a rigorous independent review process, the first cohort of countries selected to develop investment plans under the program was approved by the CIF Trust Fund Committee and includes: Africa’s Zambezi River Basin Region (Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, and Tanzania), Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Ethiopia, Fiji, Kenya, Namibia, Rwanda, and Zambia.
During the launch webinar, David McCauley, Senior Climate Finance Advisor at the Global Environment Facility and co-chair of the NPC Program’s Independent Evaluation Group, emphasized how widespread interest in NbS was in Expressions of Interest, but that implementation experience varied from country to country. He called for efforts to make this understanding more coherent:
“There is a real opportunity here, but the experience thus far is that it’s a bit disparate and thus this Learning Platform with the initial 10 programs should be quite helpful as we go forward. The expert panel involved in screening the 48 EOIs found evidence that the understanding of the concepts was quite mixed, particularly the applied aspects of NbS, which varied tremendously.”
Watch a recording of the webinar here:
The overwhelming demand for NbS demonstrated by the response to the NPC EoI call comes as no surprise to panelist, Hisham Osman, Senior Environmental Engineer at the World Bank office in Kenya. He noted that NbS is a novel approach for framing and informing climate investments:
“Sovereigns are not rewarded for mainstreaming nature positive investments, and there is an over reliance on government budgets, donor grant funded projects and niche small scale transactions. This is where we can make a difference with programs like NPC, helping governments to establish these programs and building the Platform to bring multiple partners on board.”
From a country perspective, the panel brought forward many requests from the Learning Platform. Daniela Faria, Finance Analyst at the General Coordination for Sustainable Finance at Brazil’s Ministry of Finance, shared that although nature has long been a priority for the Brazilian government, the NbS approach is novel, and needs to be uniformly understood and instituted:
“We prioritize Nature-based Solutions but not as a guideline. We should build more capacity from now on to encourage NbS as a guideline from the design of projects and programs”.
For Adifires Worku, the National Coordinator for the Ethiopian Forestry Department’s Green Legacy Initiative Technical Committee, the opportunity for peer exchange is of greatest value from the NPC Learning Platform. While countries may have their unique contexts, Adiferes, sees the Learning Platform facilitating the exchange of country lessons to mainstream NbS at a national level:
It’s already happening – because of this platform I am already learning from colleagues who have been speaking here. ” He elaborated, “Working together, listening to their approach, learning from them, listening to their challenges, listening to their best practices is going to be very supportive for us.”
The insights shared during the launch webinar are shaping the activities of the NPC Learning Platform for the months ahead. Based on each country’s needs, the NPC Learning Platform is designing a series of contextualized trainings on Nature-based Solutions to support the country-led investment planning process. We would love to hear from you. Should you have any input in how the NPC Learning Platform develops, please reach out to Amita Ramachandran at aramachandran4@worldbank.org.