Mobilizing Finance, Empowering Communities, and Scaling Nature’s Solutions

Cutting greenhouse gas emissions is essential, but it’s not enough to win the fight against climate change. To truly restore our planet and shape the future of our global economy, we must also pull carbon from the atmosphere — a challenge that demands both bold technical innovation and nature’s own solutions.

At The Rockefeller Foundation, we believe in the power of nature-based solutions. They are cost-effective and offer the most immediate opportunity to sequester carbon — providing potentially up to 37 percent of the mitigation needed to meet the Paris Agreement targets by 2030.

That’s why we are excited to attend COP16, the 2024 U.N. Biodiversity Conference. We wish all of Wall Street could be with us in Cali, Colombia, too, because the vital conversation about how to invest in and preserve nature’s biodiversity must be brought to centers of financial power and into the mainstream as we work collaboratively and urgently to channel private capital toward nature-based solutions and the communities that support them.

Indigenous in the Amazon turn to the planet’s biodiversity for healing. Our grantee, the Amazon Conservation Team, supports them. (Photo Credit Masha Hamilton)

Our Innovative Finance program aims to support the development and adoption of  financial mechanisms to channel investments toward nature-based solutions and ensure that these mechanisms fight climate change by amplifying proven practices to sustain biodiversity and climate resilience while also securing equitable access to resources and fair distribution of benefits.

In advancing this work, indigenous groups, farmers, and local stakeholders must be at the forefront of these conversations.

With just six years left to achieve the global diversity targets adopted in 2022, COP16 represents a critical moment to mobilize finance and scale community-led action to preserve natural resources.

Nature’s Role in the Global Economy

Some 55 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) — equivalent to an estimated $58 trillion — is moderately or highly dependent on nature, estimates PricewaterhouseCoopers, the multinational accounting firm that operates in 152 countries.

Construction, agriculture, and food and beverages are among the most nature-dependent industries, relying on either the direct extraction of resources from the land or the ocean, or the provision of ecosystem services such as healthy soils, clean water, pollination, and a stable climate.

Yet given the interconnected nature of the global economy, nearly all industries will be potentially disrupted by climate change due to its effects on supply chains, a recent study notes.

In fact, 88 percent of global CFOs recognize the importance of transforming financial decision-making to address environmental and social issues, according to the Sustainability Barometer 2024 from the Accountants for Sustainability. Of those, though, only 9 percent feel equipped with the necessary tools and techniques.

Implementing nature-based solutions requires a new way of thinking about the corporate bottom line and extractive approaches.

More Topics on the Agenda

Regenerative agriculture is also on the COP16 agenda, and we are focused on accelerating the transition to regenerative practices by supporting financial mechanisms to enable farmers to transition their land management practices, as well as driving demand for food grown in climate-friendly ways through school meals and other institutional purchasing.

A shift to climate-resilient farming has the potential to remove 100-200 gigatons of carbon from the atmosphere by the end of the century, notes One Earth, an environmental non-profit focused on addressing climate change and biodiversity loss through science-based solutions and collective action. This is equivalent to the lifetime emissions of 1.4-2.9 billion average cars.

The Foundation has supported the transition to regenerative agriculture globally. In the United States, we invested in Mad Capital’s Perennial Fund II to provide American farmers with tailored loans that help them transition to regenerative organic farmland while also increasing farmer profits. This investment is one of the keys to keeping pace with the surge in consumer demand for regenerative organic food and fiber.

Participants in Biodiversity COP16 in Colombia discuss the importance of investing in regenerative agriculture and other nature-based solutions. (Photo Credit Joe Short Photography)

The Biodiversity COP agenda in Colombia also includes ongoing discussions about the use of digital sequence information (DSI), which refers to the digital data representing the biochemical makeup of the world’s genetic diversity. Key issues center on who benefits from this data and how local stewards are compensated, particularly amid increasing biodiversity loss.

The Foundation has been involved and leading in this discussion since we launched the Periodic Table of Food Initiative, which is uncovering the biomolecular composition of foods through a global network of collaborators and standardized tools and training. At COP15, the global community agreed to a landmark framework on DSI, but more remains to be done.

The bottom line? Biodiversity builds ecosystem resilience while supporting carbon sequestration. Actions that empower Indigenous groups, farmers, and local communities prioritize both biodiversity and carbon storage can secure 95 percent of biodiversity benefits and nearly 80 percent of carbon stocks than could be obtained by prioritizing either value alone.