Workshop at Innovate4Climate: Innovating Public Incentives for Nature-Based Solutions

To safeguard the livelihoods of struggling rural economies and help farmers boost their dwindling crop yields, governments are designing policies to reward people who grow trees and restore land. But public sector leaders often run into roadblocks when planning these programs, making it difficult to maximize policy impacts and minimize implementation costs.

To close this gap, WRI established the Restoration Policy Accelerator, a peer-to-peer, innovation program for government officials looking to improve existing landscape restoration incentives or design new ones. Drawing on two years of experience with the program in Latin America, this session at the World Bank Innovate4Climate will highlight the creative solutions addressing incentive program bottlenecks and unlocking public funding for implementers. The session aims to address the following questions: How are governments improving marginalized groups’ accessibility to payments for ecosystem services?; how can carbon taxes accelerate or impede land restoration in forest and agricultural landscapes?; and how to achieve a balance between agricultural and environmental incentives to produce, protect, conserve and restore land? The panel will include four world-leading experts and mentors working on private investment and policy instruments for land restoration.

Speakers:

  • Soffia Alarcon, Associate Director, Americas, Schneider Electric Sustainability Business
  • Cecilia Cordoba, Investment Director for Latin America, Mirova Natural Capital
  • Jennifer Alix-Garcia, Professor and Department Head of Applied Economics, Oregon State University
  • Hans Grosse Werner, Deputy Director, Instituto Forestal (INFOR), Chile
  • Maggie Gonzalez, Ecological Economist, Initiative 20x20, World Resources Institute
  • René Zamora Cristales, Senior Associate, Initiative 20x20, World Resources Institute
  • Victoria Rachmaninoff, Policy Accelerator Research Analyst, Initiative 20x20, World Resources Institute