The Green Finance for Sustainable Landscapes (GF4SL) project innovates by trying to instill a new paradigm whereby sustainable land use becomes the new businesses as-usual and the considerable resources of private finance support this transition.
The project will bring together private finance institutions that are ready to commit to a new future and together seek to identify the commercially viable sustainable land use models that are still poorly understood today and establish these as the standard of tomorrow.
GF4SL will develop a standardized framing, measurement and monitoring of environmental and social impact related to agro-forestry loans and investments by using a standard set of key performance indicators. It will also enhance the capacity of community-based forestry and agribusiness producer groups and enterprises to better access business knowledge products and private investment for socially and environmentally sustainable projects.
By collecting, structuring and disseminating information on how sustainable and deforestation-free land use production models can be commercially viable, the project will fill in important information gaps that today act as barriers to the more active engagement of community-based forestry and agribusiness producer groups private finance institutions and companies to secure private investment for shifting their production models. The activities will therefore directly contribute to the acceleration of the necessary shift of land use to make it more sustainable, reduce deforestation, and reduce negative climate impacts.
GF4SL is a joint initiative of the Collaborative Partnership on Forest (CPF), which will be executed by UNEP and CIFOR until 2024. Through this initiative funded by the Global Environment Facility, the CPF will be facilitated to use its convening power to bring together a broad range of actors across non-governmental, governmental and private sectors to promote the adoption of green and sustainable principles in finance across thematic areas of sustainable forest management. The CPF will also support sharing of green finance ideas between sectors to promote replication and support the development, testing and validation of innovative forest finance products and systems.
