What are the benefits of restoration investment?
- The importance of restoration is increasingly recognized – not least due to the challenges posed by climate change – but more action and funding are urgently needed to scale up restoration. As climate change accelerates, healthy ecosystems will serve as a critical buffer against climate impacts.
- Restoration has enormous potential to generate market and non-market benefits for different types of investors. Derived from ecosystem services gained. Restoration can generate market benefits in the form of financial returns or savings, as well as social and environmental nonmarket benefits to public, private, and philanthropic investors
- The economic and business case for different types of restoration projects has not been convincingly made. This stems from the concern that restoration is mostly an upfront cost, with long-term social and environmental benefits which cannot be easily monetized. Key drivers of underinvestment include a lack of awareness about the critical role of ecosystem services, and insufficient knowledge and data on the costs and benefits of restoration, among others.
Unlocking restoration finance
The UN Decade Finance Task Force (FTF) aims to catalyze actions that can contribute to unlocking the capital needed to meet the Decade’s goals. The FTF will coordinate catalytical research, tools, datasets, projects, and partnerships and take steps to increase awareness and foster political will in the public or private sectors, in support of scaling up investment in ecosystem restoration.
This Stock Take report, launched during GLF Climate: Frontiers of Change, is the first in a series of FTF outputs that will chart the course of the Task Force efforts through 2030. Based on the Stock Take, a Roadmap will be developed which will lay out the work of the FTF in the coming years, covering primary research that the FTF will conduct through its members and also using the FTF to showcase the work of others, relevant to the financial sector. The Roadmap will be structured around the following key four pillars of work, with initial workshops covering these topics kicking off in early 2023:
Pillar 1. Government and Sectoral Policy Levers
Pillar 2. Knowledge, Data, and Tools
Pillar 3: Financial Sector Regulation, and Initiatives
Pillar 4: Financial Markets and Investment Instruments
