Recent work on the ground has identified that investment in landscape restoration faces funding gaps and has limited scale up potential due to three layers of barriers.
The first layer relates to the local investment climate in the countries with largest landscape restoration opportunities. Many of these countries have nascent capital markets, limited appetite for corporate social responsibility, and challenging policy environments, creating significant barriers to investment of any sort.
The second layer of barriers relates to restoration practitioners. Those carrying out restoration need to be able to better define commercially viable revenue-generating activities within landscape restoration. Also restoration practitioners seeking finance need to shift in mind-set from grant-recipient to investee.
The third layer of barriers comes from the investor community. They are reluctant to invest in sectors often perceived as informal and capital-intensive such as agricultural and forestry and especially in the lesser understood landscape restoration activities.
This case study session will use investment examples to illustrate these barriers and facilitate discussion on commonalities and contrasts with other participant experiences.
Key questions addressed:
- How can we close the gap between the scale of commitments and the level of funding for landscape restoration?
- How can we generate a clearer definition of revenue-generating activities for landscape restoration?
- What enabling investments are required to overcome barriers to landscape restoration investments?
