Conservation and innovative financing of high forest cover, low deforestation regions (Vital reserves)

The concept of “irrecoverable carbon” designates stores of carbon which, if degraded or destroyed, cannot be restored before 2050, the date by which humanity must have attained carbon neutrality if warming is to be limited to no more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels. Alongside the Congo Basin and the mangroves of South-East Asia, the Amazon is one of the primary areas in which irrecoverable carbon is concentrated. It is also a hotspot of global biodiversity. These stretches enclosing both irrecoverable carbon and irreplaceable biodiversity are described by a still-emerging concept of “vital reserves”, the conservation of which is essential not only to fighting climate change, but to the means of subsistence and the wellbeing of populations. Nonetheless, these areas have limited access to international climate financing, and therein lies the whole aim of the project: to encourage the emergence of innovative and sustainable financing in order to ensure the long-term integrity of these regions and in four key countries: Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru.

The project has 3 main focuses:

• Creating conditions favourable to sustainable management and the long-term protection of vital reserves.
• Creating, protecting and sustainably managing a vital reserve in each country involved.
• Ensuring close monitoring and evaluation in order to capitalise and encourage the replicability of innovative financing mecha-nisms in other locations.

• Demonstrating the socio-economic, climate and biodiversity conservation benefits associated with the setting-up and maintenance of vital reserves.
• Feeding into international thinking on the sustainable financing of conservation and of regions located within high forest cover, low deforestation (HFLD) countries.
• Encouraging the replicability of promising innovative financing mechanisms in other Amazon countries and beyond.

Many areas rich in irrecoverable carbon and biodiversity (“vital reserves”) are ineligible for market-based climate financing due to their low historic deforestation rates. Current climate financing frameworks (under article 6 of the Glasgow Climate Pact ) do provide emergency financing for forests, but not for their long-term management. This project therefore offers innovations in matters of sustainable financing (other than carbon offsetting) for these vital reserves, which will be available to high forest cover, low deforestation countries. A working group dedicated to the Amazon will be created as part of Conservation International’s Sustainable Finance Laboratory to support the implementation of financing mechanisms in the countries involved, while ensuring these are linked to discussion and learnings from the financial solutions initiated and tested in other locations. The project also facilitates the development and/or opera-tionalisation of the mechanisms identified as promising in these countries, through the allocation of seed financing.