About GLF Climate 2021
Hosted digitally and in Glasgow alongside COP26, the GLF Climate 2021 hybrid conference made a unanimous call for ambitious, concrete action to stop the climate crisis.
Attended by 4,386 digital participants from 145 countries, along with 481 in-person participants at the University of Glasgow, the event featured 400 leading scientists, activists, Indigenous leaders, financiers, youth, and government leaders.
Across 67 plenaries, interactive sessions, launches, and climate talks, GLF Climate: Forests, Food, Finance – Frontiers of Change explored the potential of three key climate solutions: forest restoration, resilient food systems, and sustainable finance. Messages spread on social media rallied 41.34 million people around concrete ways to address the climate emergency as quickly as possible.
Greening Finance vs Financing Green
The question is not if we move, but if we are able to move quickly enough, and if we are able to move together and create the right alliances,” said Carole Dieschbourg, Luxembourg’s Minister for the Environment, Climate and Sustainable Development, in her opening address at the fourth GLF Investment Case Symposium in 2019.
‘Financing green’ and ‘greening finance’ are two sides of the same coin, and they enable us to respond to the above challenge by providing an opportunity for increased coherence and depth in efforts to achieve ecosystem restoration objectives and zero-deforestation value chains while delivering the mitigation and adaptation benefits our planet requires.
As the World Bank defines it, ‘financing green’ refers to the financing of projects that contribute – or intend to contribute – to the conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of biodiversity and its services to people. Meanwhile, ‘greening finance’ is centered on directing financial flows away from projects with a negative impact on biodiversity and ecosystems, and towards projects that mitigate the negative impact – or pursue positive environmental impact as a co-benefit.
There are some actions that help advance both categories of investments. A key example is the reform of agricultural subsidies which, by shifting from incentivizing harmful production practices to techniques supporting conservation, can significantly contribute to both improving environmental outcomes and reducing the biodiversity risk associated with a company’s practices. Such policies have the potential to improve the potential cashflows associated with biodiversity projects, promote sustainable use, and drive better risk management practices.
This plenary examines ways to hasten the move towards the adoption and incorporation of Nature-based Solutions (NbS) and sustainable land-use approaches in sustainable finance practices while exploring new opportunities to help increase financing for sustainable land use activities.
