This post is also available in: Español
This post is also available in: Español
Updated by the ThinkLandscape team on 8 December 2025.
Watch the 8th Investment Case on demand, and follow our live coverage of COP30.
This week, at the COP30 climate summit in Belém, Brazil, the Global Landscapes Forum (GLF) held its 8th Investment Case Symposium – a side event focused on sustainable investing and finance.
Sponsored by the government of Luxembourg, the event gathered more than 4,000 people from 147 countries in person and online to tackle the challenges of financing nature’s frontlines, building on the discussions on climate finance at COP30 itself.
Here are a few important lessons we learned.
In her opening address, Éliane Ubalijoro, director general of CIFOR-ICRAF, pointed out that the world is standing at a decisive point in history.
“Science, local knowledge and capital are converging as never before,” she said. “If we act now, we can reshape finance into a force that allows humanity to prosper within planetary boundaries.”
This is a moment of “profound planetary urgency,” agreed Thomas Schoos, director general for international, European and internal affairs at Luxembourg’s Ministry of Environment, Climate and Biodiversity, adding that “finance must evolve.”
Schoos announced two new initiatives on behalf of the Luxembourg government.
The first, a five-year Climate Nexus Investment Program vested with EUR 320 million, “will take an integrated approach, connecting climate with nature, with communities, science and finance to drive a fair, inclusive and sustainable transition.”
What’s more, Luxembourg and the GLF are also co-developing the Rio Changemakers Initiative, “a bold, inclusive and science-guided initiative designed to unlock private investment across climate, biodiversity, land and community… powered by AI and rooted in partnership.”
With less than 15 percent of climate and nature finance currently reaching local actors, this new initiative will address this funding gap by leveraging AI to match investors and funds with community-led projects worldwide.
“This platform will connect investors with high-impact, locally-led projects, using the digital tools that we have now to match capital with purpose, at unprecedented speed and scale,” Schoos added.
“It will be guided by science-based metrics, transparent reporting and robust safeguards.”
COP30 host country Brazil had already announced the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a USD 125 billion fund that will be invested in emerging markets and using the profits to support countries with low and declining deforestation rates.
The goal, said Garo Batamanian, director general of Brazil’s Forest Service, is to recognize the full value of standing forests.
The TFFF will not replace existing funding sources, he said, but will “complement and bring more money to support forests, because we need more money.”
There are already numerous pathways through which smallholders and communities can access funding.
These include traditional means, such as borrowing money from family, or by setting up co-operative structures, such as microfinance schemes and village savings and loan associations.
Newer ways include supply chain finance, where the buyers of smallholder products advance them credit.
“What is new is that we have a number of new instruments, whether they are certification, traceability tools or digital finance tools, that make it possible to really scale up this supply chain finance modality,” said Marco Boscolo, senior forestry officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
And while banks have always been reluctant to make loans to smallholders, “things are changing,” he said. “Even in developing countries, many banks are now aligning with the sustainable finance criteria and initiatives.”
One example of innovative financing came from Rekia Foudel, managing partner and founder of the Cote d’Ivoire-based Barka Fund.
“Smallholder farmers are the most impacted by climate change and where we want to see most of the change happen,” she said.
Barka provides financing to small-and-medium size enterprises (SMEs). “We present restoration as a business case,” she added, explaining that investments in sustainability and restoration of their providers’ commodities are built into the loans.
At the CRDB Bank Foundation in Tanzania, head of operations Joycelean Makule described its financial-literacy platform: “What commercial banks want to see is: how can we change these small businesses into becoming profitable?”
Smallholders are encouraged and guided to set up interest-free bank accounts, purchase inputs through the bank and keep cash flow records.
“So far, we have been able to offer financial literacy to over 100,000 Tanzanians in the agricultural sector,” she said. “We are piloting a restorative solution.”
Meanwhile, Victoria Crawford, director of agriculture and food at the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), described how the network works with its members – large multinationals within the agricultural and food space – “to scale investment in restoration and in sustainable land management.”
“For the companies, this is really an increasing priority as their supply chains are being hit, similarly to what smallholders are facing, with increasing physical risks, droughts, floods, soil degradation,” she added.
“These all affect business resilience, so addressing them is critical.”
Public and national development banks (NDBs) also have a big role to play in accelerating sustainable finance opportunities, especially in the agricultural sector.
“We know that public development banks account for two-thirds of the financing going to the agricultural sector annually,” said Ferruccio Santetti, regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean and global lead for sustainable finance at the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI).
“They are by far the largest credit provider to agriculture. How can we build environmental and social management systems that are fit for purpose?”
As many NDBs work with intermediaries to reach agricultural producers, Santetti pointed out the opportunity to build safeguards into credit lines, bonds and capital-raising instruments through intermediary relationships, as well as by using AI to collect financial indicators.
The process of making grants and reporting requirements can systematically exclude the people doing conservation work.
“Conservation is a job for people who don’t live in nature, [but for] the people who live in nature, that’s [their] life,” said Gabriel Nunes, science lead at GainForest.
“How can you quantify the conservation efforts of people who have done conservation for their whole lives?
Nunes and his team are creating digital wallets and eco-certifications for communities, helping them put a financial value on their work and, in doing so, helping them get funding on their own terms.
So, how can we bridge the gap between the wants and timelines of large investors and those of communities?
One crucial step is to design specific risk mechanisms for smallholders and tackle inequities in opportunity, coverage and impact monitoring.
“Capacity building is creating value – it could be remunerated for investors, it could be remunerated for farmers, but the tools are not there yet,” said Stéphane Perrier, global lead at CIFOR-ICRAF’s Resilient Landscapes venture.
Women’s work must be made more visible and quantifiable to channel more funding to women-led organizations and lessen gender inequality.
“If you don’t measure something, you don’t see it; it’s not visible, and this is very much the case with women’s contributions to climate mitigation and adaptation,” said Jeannette Gurung, executive director of Women Organizing for Change in Agriculture and Natural Resource Management (WOCAN).
WOCAN has created the W+ Standard, which verifies outcomes from initiatives to empower women and certifies projects by giving them market credit value.
This helps make projects more attractive for investors while ensuring at least 20 percent of the price of credits goes directly back to the women’s organization to be used at their discretion.
“We thought we needed to create a different kind of credit to unlock financial capital to reduce risks in the supply chain and to scale social impact through this mindset of capitalization,” said Bruna Rezende, founder and CEO of IRIS, about the W+ Standard.
The 8th Investment Case also featured a Dragons’ Den-style session, which saw several nature-based projects pitch their business case to investors.
Alejandro Calderon, CEO of Colombia-based Mutual Empathy, pitched an investment opportunity to protect the flying rivers of the Amazon – vast air currents carrying vapor – by supporting Indigenous governance across 2 million hectares of the Colombian Amazon.
Governments concerned about both water and food security were already showing interest, he said. Using scientific and bio-cultural indicators, Mutual Empathy can monitor the health of the flying rivers while ensuring that forest communities maintain their water source and safeguard their future prosperity.
Reforestation was also the theme of another funding opportunity in the mangroves of Bangladesh.
“We have the world’s largest mangrove forest,” said Kazi Amadul, senior director of strategic planning and head of climate action at Friendship, referring to the Sundarbans.
Protecting just one hectare of mangroves can sequester 24 metric tons of carbon, he pointed out, as well as providing flood protection and livelihoods to more than 100,000 people through honey production, fishing and the collection of seaweed.
“This is a very unique solution, which connects nature and economy,” he said. “We have the technology, the knowledge and the expertise. We only need to replicate, to bring back our forests and prevent deforestation.”
Naturally, the event tackled one of the most pressing questions today: can artificial intelligence help speed up investment flows towards locally-led climate action – and if so, how?
Speakers were rather divided on the question.
On the positive side, Carolina Suarez, CEO of Latimpacto, explained how her company uses AI to map capital flows and impact activities, analyzing more than 200,000 news items in Spanish, Portuguese and English every month.
By identifying where resources are moving to and who is driving impact, she said, “we are transforming scattered data into structured knowledge, which reduces uncertainty for investors and accelerates due diligence.”
“We need to find new ways of observing the ecosystem in real time,” she added. “The challenge is not just building smarter tools and more data but how we can connect them with people, with communities, with territories and organizations, and how we want to drive this change.”
For Josimara Baré, Coordinator of the Indigenous Council of Roraima’s Rutî Indigenous Fund, AI and other technologies can help collect quantitative and qualitative information from the communities “so we can understand long-term what impact this finance is having.”
“It can help with financial processes, accounting and financial reports. So we use AI to enhance what we are already doing.”
Daouda Sembene, CEO of AfriCatalyst, agreed that AI offered a lot of potential to increase productivity and boost economic growth by cutting costs and finding efficiencies in sectors as disparate as agriculture, health, education and finance.
One such example, he said, was a greater ability for the government of South Africa to improve tax collection.
Benoît Clément, growth and product advisor at Evercity, said AI helps his company build risk models for climate finance. “This means we’re able to get real-time data on assets, supply chains and the landscapes themselves.”
However, he pointed out, there are problems associated with AI as well, such as gaps in the quality of data it produces and its opaque nature: “We can’t see how results generated by AI came to be.”
What’s more, “a lot of individuals and institutions don’t get to decide how their data is used, when it’s used and why – and that comes back to governance and the design of the systems.”
Sembene, meanwhile, identified another issue: the digital divide. While organizations in rich countries can use AI to improve efficiency, many of their counterparts in the Global South simply don’t have access.
“The [Global] North is investing hundreds of billions of dollars in AI and data centers,” he said. “How can we also make sure that it can benefit the Global South?”
Baré concluded her remarks by reminding participants that people have been talking about climate change for 30 years already.
“We no longer say ‘climate change.’ We say ‘climate emergency.’ Really, we need to make big changes – and for these changes to happen, we need big investments.”
“Let’s all work together to build the pipeline, connect maturity stages and unlock capital for the landscapes that need it most,” said Serge Wilmes, Luxembourg’s Minister of Environment, Climate and Biodiversity.
“The future of nature-based investment depends on our ability to collaborate across sectors, cultures, and disciplines. It depends on our willingness to listen to science, to empower communities and to take bold steps toward a regenerative economy.”
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