Fostering Sustainable Finance in the Caribbean and Amazonia
The first of two iterative International Waters (IW): LEARN Twinning Exchanges on sustainable financing was recently held between the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund (CBF) and the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO) in Brasilia, Brazil. This critical peer-to-peer event focused on knowledge sharing and capacity building in conservation financing to enhance sustainable financing mechanisms for conservation efforts and facilitate the exchange of best practices between the Caribbean and Amazon regions.
The engagement allowed for open discussions on common challenges towards strengthening transboundary water management across both regions. The exchange was designed to enhance institutional capacity for designing and managing sustainable financing through exploring and adapting innovative financial instruments. Key discussions covered innovative conservation financing and developing models for community engagement and equitable benefit-sharing. This format enabled participants to determine successful financing models, ensuring the long-term effectiveness of conservation initiatives in the Caribbean and Amazon.
Reflecting on the core deliverables set for the exchange, Tanja Lieuw, CBF’s Conservation Finance Program Manager, stated in her presentation that, “The true value of this twinning lies in our commitment to developing a joint policy brief that synthesizes our successes, challenges, and opportunities in sustainable financial mechanisms. We are building a foundation for effective policy integration across both the Caribbean and Amazonia.
CBF presented on the Caribbean Blue Economy Financing (Caribbean BluEFin) Project emphasizing the importance of utilizing blue economy principles to develop regional financial mechanisms. The project aims to create enabling systems for private sector participation and has developed a regionally based Blue Economy Hub to provide socioeconomic opportunities.
ATCO Administrative Director Edith Paredes highlighted the regional significance of the partnership by sharing, “These exchanges are really important and add value for participants. The participants, once they get back home, share it with authorities and it becomes a common policy. There is a lot of technical capacity within all the countries and other initiatives with good practices and I think they are very valuable. When we work together and put in our human, technical and financial resources we will get further.”
The focus shifts to planning the second, reciprocal exchange, which will see the ACTO team visit the Caribbean later this year. IW: LEARN initiates Twinning Exchanges, strengthens collaboration, shares technical expertise, and scales up solutions across the Global Environment Facility’s (GEF) International Waters (IW) portfolio. The Caribbean BluEFin Project and the MACA project partnered in this twinning to address to strengthen institutional capacity within their unique ecological and economic contexts.
The Caribbean BluEFin Project is financed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), implemented through the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and executed by the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund (CBF). The project is supported by co-financing from the German Development Bank (KfW) on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the French Development Agency (AFD), the French Facility for Global Environment (FFEM), and the German Corporation for International Cooperation (GIZ).
