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 science-guided, AI-enabled global marketplace designed to accelerate sustainable investment in climate biodiversity, land and community solutions.”
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.”
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 we can 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.”
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