Nature-based solutions (NBS) can contribute to equitable and sustainable development across Latin America and the Caribbean and represent an important investment opportunity for national and subnational governments, infrastructure service providers, development banks, and corporations. Examining the status of NBS efforts and results within the region can shed light on what is required to drive more investment towards NBS projects. To chart a pathway forward, this brief provides a regional review of NBS projects, their status, and implications for investment. These NBS projects aim to address a variety of objectives, including securing water supply, improving water quality, reducing landslide risk, and helping to manage urban flooding, river flooding, or coastal flooding and erosion. The projects utilize a broad range of types of NBS, from forest management to coral reef restoration. This brief outlines the difficulties to scaling NBS adoption in the region and identifies strategies to address the challenges moving forward.
Highlights▪ Landscape restoration as a nature-based solution can improve rural livelihoods by increasing food and water security, biodiversity, and soil quality and developing sustainable value chains.
Improve monitoring and transparencyFor adaptive management, it is essential to establish a baseline for tracking the progress and impacts of public incentive programs.
Diversify tree-based restoration activities with native speciesMost public incentive programs supporting restoration were designed to encourage only tree planting, with little attention to multispecies reforestation and species selection. Including more natives and silviculturual methods is important to increase diversity in restoration practices.
Create value for long-term sustainabilityPublic incentives must be conceived as an investment to create value, not a cost. Public incentives can help to reduce the up-front cost of impact investments in restoration, thus reducing the risk in investments.
Attach programs to laws and robust institutionsAttaching incentives to laws can ensure long-term application, but to make environmental and agricultural laws effective, institutions with strong management and operational capabilities must lead the implementation of the programs.
Land restoration is an effective nature-based solution for combating rural poverty and climate change across Latin America. But without well-designed public incentives that reward farmers and forest managers for protecting and growing trees, it will be difficult to achieve the region's food security, climate, forest conservation, and biodiversity goals. This issue brief evaluates the public incentives of six Latin American countries and calculates how much they pay farmers and other landholders that restore land.
Land restoration is an effective nature-based solution for combating rural poverty and climate change across Latin America. But without well-designed public incentives that reward farmers and forest managers for protecting and growing trees, it will be difficult to achieve the region's food security, climate, forest conservation, and biodiversity goals. This issue brief evaluates the public incentives of six Latin American countries and calculates how much they pay farmers and other landholders that restore land.
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