Instiglio was hired in response to WWF Colombia’s interest of assessing the value-add and viability of creating an impact investment fund with environmental and social criteria as a useful tool to financially support productive and sustainable activities within Heritage Colombia’s mandate.
Country
Colombia
Timeline
2019-2020
Type of Project
Thought leadership
Sector
Environmental protection
Project
Partners
project description
Herencia Colombia’s Project Finance for Permanence (PFP) was established as a model agreed on by public and private stakeholders to guarantee perpetual financial sustainability for protected ecosystems. However, the conservation of national natural capital is challenging due to external pressures such as threats to biodiversity and institutional weaknesses. These pressures are often related with traditional and unsustainable behaviors such as deforestation and illegal mining held by communities in the buffer zones near protected areas, enhanced by weak governance structures in these territories.
In response, WWF and WCS aim to boost an impact investing ecosystem, in order to mobilize private capital into innovative and impact driven businesses located in the buffer areas and therefore, promote behavioral changes in the actors of the prioritized landscapes towards the conservation and sustainable management of nature.
Concretely, to find the right strategy to drive private investments into Herencia Colombia’s goals, Instiglio’s assessment was focused on developing an investment framework that responds to lessons learned and best practices of funds that operate across different regions of the world, the assessment of readiness of a pipeline of profitable projects that generate social and environmental results, and the market for impact investing in Colombia.
Moreover, the consultancy focused on gathering and developing key elements to send signals to the market of concrete impact investing opportunities and provide any impact investor that partners with WWF a framework to decide where and how to invest. Also, Instiglio gave recommendations around what role organisations such as WWF and WCS could take to support these investments and indeed boost and influence the generation of an impact investment fund for the sustainability of protected areas along the national territory
The future implementation of these impact investing frameworks, created for Herencia Colombia, has the potential to drive philanthropic and private investors into the generation of great socio economic impact, in often rural and poor areas of Colombia, and at the same time tackle the major pressures that threaten biodiversity and natural capital, which is one of the most important assets for development of the country. Hence, the goal is to close the financing gap for social and environmental entrepreneurship and generate opportunities for the communities that are not only more impact-driven but are also financially sustainable over time.