Proactive Investment in Natural Capital (PINC)

Tropical forests provide a massive range of goods and ecosystem services. As such we can think of forests as natural capital– the stock of living organisms in forests that act together to produce the services, like climate regulation, that our wellbeing depends upon. It’s crucial that we find ways to invest proactively in this natural capital and maintain it if we are to continue to benefit over the long term.

With funding from the Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation (www.fpa2.com) the GCP is working with a researcher from the London School of Economics to gather together current understanding of existing forest financing mechanisms and explore the opportunities to create new flows of funding for forests.

Clear information and tools are needed to help policymakers to bridge the funding gap between the financing needed to save forests and the money that is currently on the table. The goal of the project is to inform policymakers of the steps needed to encourage innovative financial mechanisms to be tested and flourish.

One of the first outputs from the project is The Little Biodiversity Finance Book, a guide to proactive investment in natural capital. This will be followed by a series of briefing notes on a range of key forest finance topics.