The SCF is thrilled to announce a partnership with the Forest Investor Club in our journey toward implementing the landscape transformation goals of the Agriculture Sector Roadmap to 1.5°C. Clear business incentives to invest in forest-positive land use, such as this partnership, are imperative to scaling SCF’s work through the Farmers First Clusters.
Private sector investment can be a powerful tool for sustained positive impact on commodity-producing landscapes. The right investments follow a business model that supports an attractive risk/return profile and is carefully designed for climate, nature, and equity outcomes.
To understand alignment between needs and opportunities like these with investor preferences, the Farmer First Clusters will be partnering with the Forest Investor Club - a network of public and private financial institutions and investors committed to accelerating investments in forests and nature.
Established by the U.S. Department of State and led by a Secretariat, WBCSD, the Forest Investor Club facilitates complementary partnerships to unlock investment opportunities and develop solutions to overcome investment barriers. In this role, the Forest Investor Club is exploring ways that private investors, along with public and other sources of catalytic capital, can support the scaling up of the Farmer First Clusters.
This type of private sector investment is part of a larger array of support needed for scale. Other examples include corporate supply chain programs that incentivize practice change and international development funding support for technical assistance.
The Farmer First Clusters’ partnership with the Forest Investor Club comes on the heels of SCF members’ commitment to implement the Agriculture Sector Roadmap to 1.5°C, a pledge to urgently reduce emissions from land-use change for agricultural purposes. The roadmap outlines three pillars of action to be undertaken by agri-businesses:
- accelerate supply chain actions through specific and transparent company action plans to reduce emissions;
- drive the transformation toward Forest Positive land use management through investment to sustainable land use; and
- drive and mainstream forest-positive sector transformation through dialogue and collaboration with governments and the finance sector.
The ability to drive investment into forest-positive land use, as outlined in the second pillar, is critical to achieving transformation at scale.
SCF members being signatories of the roadmap, we are thrilled to announce our intention to align the Farmer First Clusters initiative with the roadmap’s second pillar, driving transformation toward forest-positive land use management through investment into sustainable land use. We see our partnership with the Forest Investor Club as a key step in structuring an investment model that is both appealing to business and investors, while advancing toward the landscape transformation goals of the Agriculture Sector Roadmap to 1.5°C.
