The Salazar Center’s fifth International Symposium on Conservation Impact focused on how to achieve a nature-positive future together, to catapult our communities towards durable, high-impact outcomes for climate, biodiversity, and human well-being.
We brought together diverse thought leaders to share ideas and best practices for moving beyond individual pilot projects to build lasting systems change for nature and communities across North America. Our two-day dialogue elevated the interconnectedness of biodiversity loss and climate change, both in terms of their impacts and solutions, while highlighting how a nature-based approach can enhance the resilience of both our planet and society. By design, we assembled speakers with varied expertise and backgrounds to showcase the breadth of differing, and sometimes contrarian, opinions and ideas related to our theme. Our intent with this approach was to facilitate our attendees’ ability to deepen their understanding of the issues and perhaps challenge their perspectives.
The 2023 Symposium Synthesis Report summarizes five cross-cutting themes that emerged from the Symposium, as well as key takeaways from each session. The themes reflect ideas, needs, and opportunities raised multiple times by speakers or attendees. Like the interconnectedness of biodiversity and climate, each theme is also connected to the next. Together, they help illuminate potential shared pathways to enrich biodiversity and build long-term, stable societies and healthy economies across North America.
Don’t have time to read the full report? No problem! We’ve broken it down so you can focus on what resonates the most right now.
Cross-cutting Theme: Empower
“A vision without resources is little more than a hallucination.” – Àngel Peña
Despite unprecedented financial commitments by federal governments, we still face an enormous financing gap in achieving our climate and biodiversity goals. This is true globally and in North America, with an estimated global Biodiversity Financing Gap of $598-824 billion USD annually. While philanthropy has made large investments in NBS, we still do not have sufficient, equitably distributed financial resources to meet this moment. We need a cross-sector, all-of-government approach to find creative ways to support this work.
Building financial sustainability for NBS through private-sector investment
We heard consensus that much of the private sector supports investing in NBS and is pivoting their operations to intentionally support it. Still, significant barriers remain to the private sector’s investment in more impactful and innovative approaches and projects. Those barriers include a lack of consensus and transparency around systems for assessing risk and the impact of the work, especially when it comes to biodiversity. A clearer understanding of cost-benefit in relationship to biodiversity and to its associated metrics is needed to accelerate effective private-sector investment. Private sector companies have already implemented the easier, low-hanging fruit of NBS projects. Now they need help tackling the more challenging and complex ones. Importantly, the corporate sector needs better processes for working with frontline communities meaningfully.
Speakers reflected upon emerging carbon and biodiversity markets and how these markets can potentially supply ‘additive’ funds. However, practitioners remain concerned about these markets’ overall transparency and accountability. International efforts such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures and the Science-based Targets Initiative are working to help alleviate these concerns through transparent and durable reporting mechanisms. There is a tremendous need for cross-sector trust-building so that practitioners can be confident that claims of market benefits for people and nature accrue equitably and are measurable and meaningful. While funding sources, like environmental markets, are important, practitioners and policymakers can do more with existing funding sources. How can we be creative with the existing monetary sources to stack funding to drive greater and longer-lasting impacts?
The finance and corporate sectors need a clearer understanding of the benefits of biodiversity protection and how biodiversity loss puts investment at risk. This knowledge gap creates a barrier to further biodiversity investment from the finance sector. Additional data and messaging regarding biodiversity co-benefits and metrics to support tracking those co-benefits are deeply needed.
One critical opportunity that speakers raised concerning financing NBS projects is that we should not just focus on developing novel tools like environmental markets but also consider how existing financial instruments are barriers to delivering positive outcomes for biodiversity and climate efforts. We need to reform financial subsidies that harm nature and exacerbate climate impacts, such as those for fossil fuels and large-scale agriculture. This will require collaborating with policymakers across North America to examine and dismantle subsidy programs that inadvertently provide obstacles to their national and international climate and biodiversity goals.
Disinvestment in Frontline Communities
Throughout the dialogue, speakers highlighted the importance of recognizing the expertise and human capital that already exist within frontline communities. Frontline communities know what they need and have ideas for solutions to meet their communities’ challenges, but these communities often lack investment. One barrier to investment is the spatial mismatch between community-led projects and environmental markets. Investors typically require larger spatial scales for investment, while most community-led projects operate at much smaller scales. For example, the Blue Carbon projects highlighted at the Symposium struggle to access carbon markets because they are small and not aggregated.
There is a strong need to create and support a pipeline of projects ready for investment. Finally, we must develop better processes for equitable benefit sharing of financing efforts like carbon or biodiversity markets. While this is true for all frontline communities, speakers stressed a particular need for working with Indigenous communities on benefit sharing of these market and other financing tools.
Download the full 2023 Symposium Synthesis Report