Episode Study Report - IUCN...Section 2 introduces the objective, scope, purpose and methodology of the episode study. Section 3 offers Section 3 offers context for the challenge of

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Episode Study Report

© February 2017 / 1

Episode Study Report Understanding IUCN’s Role in Unlocking FLR

Finance

Prepared by Glenn G. Page

Principal, SustainaMetrix

Technical Editor, Reed Huppman

February 16, 2017

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Contents

1. Executive Summary ................................................................................................................ 3

2. Introduction ............................................................................................................................ 6

3. Context for IUCN’s Role in Unlocking Finance ....................................................................... 8

4. Findings and Implications ................................................................................................... 12

4.1. Impact Pathways: Role of ROAM in Unlocking Finance .................................................................................... 12

4.2. Knowledge Flow for Unlocking Finance: Case of Rwanda ................................................................................ 15

4.3. Critical Node of Influence: The GEF TRI Proposal/Project ............................................................................... 21

4.4. Unexpected Outcomes in Unlocking Finance for FLR ....................................................................................... 27

4.5. Promising Practices ............................................................................................................................................ 29

4.6. Conclusion and Lessons Learned ...................................................................................................................... 31

5. Results Chart and Annexes ................................................................................................. 35

Annex 1: Timelines ...................................................................................................................................................... 37

Annex 2: Persons Consulted and Interviewed ........................................................................................................... 39

Annex 3: Terms of Reference ..................................................................................................................................... 40

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1. Executive Summary

A shift in policy towards unlocking finance to support implementation of forest landscape restoration (FLR) is

underway across the globe and operating at different scales. Three narratives are described in this episode

study that serve as evidence of this policy change. At each scale, evidence is presented that illustrates the

contribution of the funding provided by UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) granted to

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) for the implementation of the International Forestry

Knowledge (KNOWFOR) programme. Each narrative in the episode study illustrates how the resources led to

equipping decision makers and intermediaries with the tools and knowledge to begin to unlock finance and

implement forest landscape restoration (FLR).

At the institutional scale of IUCN, we conclude that KNOWFOR contributed to a policy shift by the decision-

makers at IUCN to move from a set of projects (linked to FLR) to FLR as a core long-term programme focus.

KNOWFOR funding has been leveraged to secure additional financial resources by IUCN, who have become a

global leader in FLR. At the country scale, Rwanda is one example where change in domestic policy has

supported the development and testing of innovative methods to unlock finance. With a growing number of

countries pledging to FLR, the KNOWFOR project contributed to the development of tools and methods that

generate information to equip country leaders to developing finance mechanisms that meet their unique

context and domestic development agenda. The Rwanda example is illustrative of the nature of the challenge

and commitment required for success. Finally, at the global scale, the investment by the Global Environmental

Facility (GEF) in the Restoration Initiative (TRI) is examined to illustrate KNOWFOR’s contribution to a policy

shift of donors to support large-scale implementation of FLR.

The episode study emphasises the critical combination of the outcome-oriented and flexible funding provided

by DFID and how this was well matched to the unique niche of IUCN, their ability to work across scales and

sectors, engage effectively with a wide range of FLR partners, and contribute to diplomatic successes.

Collectively, KNOWFOR contributed to the development of IUCN’s role as a technical partner to understand and

help co-create the enabling conditions to unlock finance for FLR implementation. For example, the

development, dissemination and further adaptation of the Restoration Opportunities Assessment

Methodology1 (ROAM) has been a critical impact pathway for unlocking finance. Evidence shows that the

contribution of KNOWFOR to create and further develop ROAM has been essential in equipping decision

makers with information needed to link FLR with domestic priorities and consider the actions needed

(including domestic governance and policy reform) to fund and implement FLR. The increased demand for

ROAM reinforces the value of the stakeholder-led and demand-driven approach that ROAM employs to

collaboratively understand the opportunities and challenges of FLR and co-design a road map to

implementation. We conclude KNOWFOR’s support of ROAM as a credible, realistic and tangible framework

that addresses domestic goals and objectives ranging from biodiversity conservation to food security, has been

a “game-changer” for the challenge of unlocking finance. Both the Rwanda experience and the start of GEF

project entitled “The Restoration Initiative” (TRI) illustrate the critical importance of ROAM as well as promising

innovations underway such as FLR Hubs, restoration finance events and tools such as the “Enabling

Investment Rapid Diagnostic Tool.”

1 IUCN and WRI (2014). A Guide to the Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM): Assessing

forest landscape restoration opportunities at the national or sub-national level. Working Paper (Road-test edition).

Gland, Switzerland: IUCN. 125pp.

https://www.iucn.org/theme/forests/our-work/forest-landscape-restoration/restoration-opportunities-assessment-methodology

https://www.iucn.org/theme/forests/our-work/forest-landscape-restoration/restoration-opportunities-assessment-methodology

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“Be careful for what you wish for” could be the subtitle for this episode study because the success in securing

national commitments to the Bonn Challenge has changed the nature of the challenge from securing

commitment to full-scale implementation of FLR which significantly increases the need for unlocking finance.

As one key member of the IUCN team noted, “the work supported by KNOWFOR has essentially moved the

dialogue from ‘What is FLR?’ and ‘Why should we do it?’ to ‘How do we do it’ and ‘How do we fund it?’ This

overwhelming demand translates into new challenges for IUCN and the growing network of FLR partners

regarding the scale of the challenge and the investment required to implement FLR goals.

While there are many nascent examples of progress being made in unlocking finance for implementation of

FLR at the national/subnational scale, Rwanda’s experience in cross-ministerial domestic policy reform such

as land registration, working at the district scale and learning how to engage with the private sector provides a

vignette of the essential enabling conditions and political will required to commit to FLR and “build the bridge”

to unlocking finance. The “bridge” to unlocking finance is still “under construction” in Rwanda, but it does

provide evidence of new forms of collaborative action among institutions to incentivise FLR (such as the

Climate Smart Lending Platform and Community Environment Conservation Fund), potential for state-civil

society partnerships for FLR in watershed management that links directly to FLR, and re-allocation and re-

purposing of domestic resources at the national scale to implement FLR.

The report uses the concept of impact pathways, critical nodes of influence and knowledge flow to respond to

Key Evaluation Question #1: Did KNOWFOR contribute to equipping decision makers and intermediaries?

Section 2 introduces the objective, scope, purpose and methodology of the episode study. Section 3 offers

context for the challenge of unlocking finance for FLR. Section 4 provides detailed findings and implications,

and is organised as follows:

Section 4.1 examines the critical role of ROAM as a key impact pathway and source of knowledge

required to take action to implement FLR and deeply explore implications of unlocking finance.

Section 4.2 explores the case of Rwanda as an early example of what may be possible when the

enabling conditions are in place and sufficient changes in domestic policy and governance are

underway so that new strategies to unlock public finance can be tested.

Section 4.3 focusses on IUCN’s role in equipping decision makers from GEF to invest in FLR, decision

makers from 10 countries to commit to FLR and decision makers from partner organisations (FAO and

UN Environment) to work with IUCN.

Section 4.4 lists unexpected outcomes from the perspective of key staff at IUCN and their implications

to IUCN’s journey in unlocking finance. These include the remarkable success in securing pledges to

the Bonn Challenge, the enduring challenge of creating projects that attract investors and IUCN

becoming an Accredited (AE) entity of the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Section 4.5 features a set of promising practises such as the importance of FLR Hubs, web-based

tools and FLR forums and exchanges that have proved critical for building capacity and momentum for

unlocking finance.

Section 4.6 offers conclusions and lessons learned from the experience of IUCN staff deeply involved

with FLR. We conclude that sufficient evidence has been gathered to confirm that KNOWFOR’s

contribution to IUCN was foundational in unlocking public finance to continue support of FLR, but the

challenge of unlocking finance for FLR implementation is not yet solved. Indeed, the global

community is far from it. Nevertheless, it is our summary finding that KNOWFOR has contributed to

adding a critical player (IUCN) to the partnership, developing promising knowledge products, toolkits,

processes and capacities for unlocking finance for FLR into the near future.

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A concluding section supports the core hypothesis that IUCN did indeed leverage its unique combination of

linkage to members with effective knowledge brokering, thoughtful technical analysis and effective convening

attributes to play a critical role in the development and growth of FLR.

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2. Introduction

2.1. Objective of the report

As one of three in-depth evaluative case studies prepared for IUCN, this episode study is part of the

programme evaluation of a DFID-funded programme entitled “Improving the way knowledge on forests is

understood and used internationally” (hereafter KNOWFOR). KNOWFOR aims to increase the interaction of

policy makers and forestry practitioners with relevant research and other knowledge products, tools, and

capacity building activities through improved planning for knowledge use and more deliberate learning and

reflection. The programme brings together three significant and complementary organisations in the

international forestry development sector to leverage their comparative strengths and networks to improve the

uptake of relevant knowledge in priority forest-related practise and policy processes. The report provides

evidence and summary judgement on the following hypothesis:

“That IUCN used its unique combination of linkage to members, knowledge brokering, technical analysis

and convening attributes to play a critical role in the development and growth of FLR”

2.2. Scope of the report

IUCN’s role in unlocking FLR finance is the focus of this episode study. Unlocking finance is a complex topic

that does not easily fit into a simple narrative. Three scales are examined: the scale of IUCN in moving to a

programmatic commitment to FLR by leveraging KNOWFOR funding and the use of ROAM as an important

impact pathway for knowledge to flow regarding finance; the example of Rwanda that illuminates the policy

progress and challenges in unlocking both public and private finance for FLR at a country scale; and global

scale funding that is needed to address the challenge and the example of funding secured through the GEF

TRI.

IUCN is a technical partner in the KNOWFOR tripartite, not a funding partner. This is important in the scope of

the case study as there is no requirement or target set of indicators required of IUCN by DFID in the KNOWFOR

grant agreement to unlock a target quantity of public or private finance. Nevertheless, as a technical agent and

partner, IUCN was expected to contribute to equipping decision makers with an improved understanding of

costs and benefits associated with FLR. Defining costs leads to questions on how to best mobilise resources

to support FLR, which leads to the question of how to finance FLR. Since there was no explicit requirement, it is

not surprising that there was no specific theory of change, logic model, log frame or strategy by IUCN to

specifically unlock finance. Therefore, we have applied the episode study methodology instead of the

performance story method, which requires a clear theory or logic to test. Evidence that is gathered is applied

the results chart and Key Evaluation Question #1 of the KNOWFOR evaluation.

2.3. Purpose

The purpose of this study is to add the analysis of unlocking finance to the broader understanding of how the

KNOWFOR project contributed to equipping decision makers and intermediaries with regard to the adoption

and implementation of the Bonn Challenge. As part of a wider evaluation of the KNOWFOR project, this case

study contributes to an evaluation process that begins with a systematic review and synthesis of existing

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monitoring data and is further informed by additional primary data that includes this case study. As such, this

case study adds evidence to existing monitoring data through analysis of impact pathways, knowledge flow and

critical nodes of influence that resulted in unlocking public and private finance for FLR. While many other

actors and factors are involved in unlocking finance, this episode study examines how IUCN with KNOWFOR

support unlocked finance through two specific examples, and then examines promising practises, unexpected

outcomes and lessons that can be learned for unlocking finance for FLR. The audience for this study is IUCN

and KNOWFOR partners as well as DFID.

2.4. Methodology

The methodology for this report is an episode study to trace back the influence of the policy shifts to support

unlocking finance for FLR. We illustrate this with three particular examples that illustrate the policy changes.

The methodology is similar to the companion episode studies of Guatemala and the Rwanda FLR Opportunity

Assessment described in the following steps:

1. Gaining an understanding of the unlocking finance for FLR “story”, the policy shifts at different scales and

by developing a timeline for progress made in unlocking finance at IUCN, in Rwanda, and in the nature of

the policy shift at a global scale by examining the decision-pathway that led to the GEF TRI project. This

was done through in-depth semi-structured interviews with current and former senior staff within IUCN,

members of partner organisations as well as consulting available documentation on the FLR process,

background on financing for FLR. Selected timelines are included with key dates to contribute to the

episode study narrative.

2. The development of a “results chart” based on the Key Evaluation Question. The results chart (presented

in Section 5) examines the strength of evidence gathered to support a response to Key Evaluation

Question 1. Contribution by KNOWFOR is summarised with an assessment of strength of evidence for each

example.

3. Further interviews with key partners, dialogue with other case study authors, and further literature review.

Following preliminary analysis of interview data and document review, additional interviews with key

partners were conducted, primarily with actors and resource persons outside IUCN. This step also included

further document review related to unlocking finance for FLR to verify and add to the information gathered.

Documents referenced are included as footnotes to the text. A list of persons interviewed as part of this

evaluation is presented in Annex 2. Quotes from interviews that appear in the report are coded with a number

that refers to the specific interview that is kept by the author. All interviews were recorded with the permission

of the respondent.

https://portals.iucn.org/library/node/45968


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3. Context for IUCN’s Role in Unlocking Finance

The Chief Executive Officer of Credit Suisse, Tidjane Thiam, recently noted: “Today, about $52 billion per year

flows to conservation projects, the bulk of it in public and philanthropic funds. The best estimates are that

$300 to $400 billion per year is needed to preserve healthy ecosystems on land and in the oceans, and with

them the earth’s natural capital stock of clean air, fresh water and species diversity.” 2 On 11 January 2017,

Forest Trends’ Ecosystem Marketplace reported that between 2013-2014, “the private sector channelled $8.2

billion (B) of private capital into investments that seek measurable environmental benefits and financial

returns.” 3 A UN-REDD Programme Policy Brief reports that Brazil and Indonesia combined provide over $40

billion in subsidies to palm oil, timber, soy, beef and biofuels sectors between 2009-2012. These types of

global financial trends are important context for unlocking finance for FLR. Equally important are incentives for

small and large-scale landowners, payment for ecosystem services, public sector expenditures, multilateral

and bilateral donor opportunities, interest by private not-for-profit investors and private for-profit investors.

This episode study focusses on unlocking finance for FLR, which is interpreted here to include a detailed

understanding of the issues that affect the mobilisation of funds as well as the actual outcome of securing

funds. The story of IUCN’s role in unlocking finance builds on the material presented in the companion

performance story of the Bonn Challenge as well as the Episode Studies of Guatemala and the Rwanda FLR

Opportunity Assessment. As these narratives reveal, the question of finance is often the first asked by decision-

makers when considering FLR. Indeed, the challenge of unlocking finance to restore over 150 million hectares

under the Bonn Challenge is massive. FAO estimates $36 billion are required each year to meet agreed FLR

targets. According to the 2015 FAO report, the FLR implementation challenge is tied to finance:4

“The mobilization of these financial resources remains one of the main constraints for the effective

implementation of large-scale FLR projects and programmes. It requires an urgent effort from existing

public financial instruments (national budgets, development banks), climate financing mechanisms

(Adaptation Fund, Green Climate Fund) and the private sector (impact funds and traditional investors

such as pension funds and commercial banks).”

This episode study examines this funding challenge by examining policies at multiple scales such as the

growing demand of the novel decision-support tool of ROAM, progress in Rwanda and the proposal

development and early implementation of the GEF TRI. As the secretariat of the Global Partnership on Forest

Landscape Restoration (GPFLR) and a technical partner in KNOWFOR and other FLR grants, IUCN has become

a leader in the emerging field of FLR. It has had success in growing their portfolio of projects through multiple

partnerships with donor agencies (i.e. UK, Norway and Germany) and others. Many who were interviewed

describe KNOWFOR as “foundational” or the “backbone” for building sufficient capacity within IUCN to increase

its programmatic scope by pooling financing to become more effective technical partners in advancing FLR.

2 Credit Suisse, IUCN, McKinsey 2016 report “Conservation Finance. From Niche to Mainstream: The

Building of an Institutional Asset Class” available at https://www.credit-

suisse.com/media/assets/corporate/docs/about-us/responsibility/banking/conservation-finance-en.pdf

3 State of Private Investment in Conservation 2016 A Landscape Assessment of an Emerging Market

http://www.forest-trends.org/documents/files/doc_5477.pdf#

4 FAO & Global Mechanism of the UNCCD. 2015. Sustainable financing for forest and landscape restoration:

Opportunities, challenges and the way forward. Discussion paper. Rome.

https://unfccc.int/files/cooperation_and_support/financial_mechanism/standing_committee/application/pdf/fiscal_incentives_for_agri_commodities_un-redd_policy_brief_final.pdf



http://www.unccd.int/Lists/SiteDocumentLibrary/Publications/GM_sustainable_financing_for_forest_and_landscape_restoration_opportunities_challenges.pdf

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Many describe KNOWFOR as central to IUCN in both supporting the shared diplomatic successes (as described

in the Bonn Challenge Performance Story) and contributing leverage for additional financial resources. One

IUCN staff described this as stacked financing:

“We were able to leverage KNOWFOR project money which becomes the financing mechanism that

allowed us to secure a €4 million German loan, or a large GEF project… I think in part it was the way

that we designed the programmatic approach within the forest programme through KNOWFOR’s

support and how we leveraged and stacked financing.” (#9)

As noted in IUCN’s 2016 annual report to DFID, IUCN has been successful in leveraging the DFID investment

by securing over $200 million of additional funding from many sources such as the International Climate

Initiative (IKI) of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety

(BMUB) and other national programmes as well as funding from the GEF as described in more detail in this

case study as shown in table 1 below. Many who were interviewed mentioned the “flexibility” of KNOWFOR

funding and its importance to IUCN to build a fit-for-purpose team and respond to opportunities at the global,

regional national and subnational scales to more effectively equip decision makers with knowledge on FLR.

Flexibility allowed them to respond to windows of political opportunity and work with many partners5 across

several international and regional forest policy forums. As an example, in 2016, IUCN worked at the following

forums to secure commitments to the Bonn Challenge: over 18 million hectares pledged at events such as the

Paris Climate Summit; 11.5 million hectares pledged at the Africa High-Level Bonn Challenge Roundtable;

additional commitments made at the roundtable for Bonn Challenge Latin America in Panama, and the World

Conservation Congress in 2016. As one external partner stated, IUCN’s role in securing pledges to the Bonn

Challenge was critical:

“IUCN is an honest broker with global reach, working on multiple levels and working with both the

public and private sector.”(#18)

As convener of a growing group of FLR stakeholders, IUCN’s accountability grew in the delivery and use of

knowledge, aptly summarised in the following quote by an IUCN staff:

“Accountability extends beyond contractual compliance and obligations to the donor. It must also

extend to government agencies and boundary partners that we've been working with as well. That's

why I think accountability needs to be defined in terms that are more than just the generation of

knowledge. It is about establishing purposeful knowledge uptake pathways and pushing ourselves as

IUCN and other collaborators to make sure that we are accountable for how knowledge is generated,

disseminated and, critically, used along that pathway. This means that the delivery and use of

knowledge becomes just as important and in turn this requires a proactive and iterative engagement

with primary knowledge users. IUCN and collaborators therefore set out to engage with knowledge

recipients and users from the outset, working with them interactively on the generation of knowledge

to meet their demands, and then accompanying them on a journey to identify what those new insights

mean and how boundary partners could make best use of such insights to solve specific problems and

challenges they are working with.” (#10)

5 IUCN works with many partners at the national and sub-national scale such as Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala,

Ghana. Malawi, China to name a few as well as many non governmental organizations committed to forest

landscape restoration such as Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, World Agroforestry Centre,

International Union of Forest Research Organizations, Secretariat of the United Nations Forum on Forests,

World Resources Institute and Wageningen University and Research Centre for Development and Innovation.

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The ‘journey’ in many ways begins with the challenge of unlocking finance. KNOWFOR contributed significantly

to the development of ROAM to fill an evidence gap in making the case for FLR and defining costs and benefits

of restoration. The ROAM process offered a key first step for countries to consider how FLR could address a

range of domestic priorities from climate adaptation to food security, livelihoods to biodiversity goals and how

they might be able to pay for it. Evidence shows ROAM was a game-changer, but in many ways it only begins to

illuminate just some of the many pieces needed to unlock finance for FLR. ROAM is now in high demand as it

helps countries envision how FLR could meet global goals such as Intended Nationally Determined

Contributions (INDCs) and Aichi targets for biodiversity as well as pressing issues on the domestic agenda.

KNOWFOR’s contribution to ROAM enabled IUCN and their partners to equip decision makers and fill these

knowledge gaps.

Several who were interviewed noted that policy makers who were considering a pledge or had pledged to FLR

wanted to find answers to four basic questions: how much will it cost, who will pay for it, would the money be

better spent elsewhere, and, is there a more cost effective way to achieve the same results? While ROAM does

not generate the precise solution or road map to answer any one of these questions, it provides the process

and basic elements necessary for the participating countries to develop their own response that is rooted in

best available science. Through its heavy emphasis on a stakeholder-driven process, ROAM identifies both the

opportunities for FLR and the ‘red flags’ or potentially insurmountable barriers to FLR such as legal issues of

land tenure and political/social commitment.

“Tenure situations are actually quite difficult. Countries are being held responsible. [We are very

sensitive to] indigenous people and displacement of people through FLR. This is something that we're

very wary of and something that we really look into… These issues are important to us.” (#15)

The cost/benefit analysis includes market and non-market valuation, comparisons between other

public/private land uses, and issues related to ecosystem services and how the investment in FLR can affect

other sectors such as tourism. After ROAM, one of the main knowledge gaps is how to create enabling

conditions within a country so they are ready to repurpose existing domestic resources, set up incentives and

subsidies to grow FLR and become ready for investment from a range of interested financiers. This work is

highly context specific and often requires legal reform, integration across domestic priorities and engagement

across a wide range of stakeholders such as private companies, investment managers, local decision makers,

NGOs, small farmers, traditional authorities, cooperatives, etc. The Rwanda story is important as it illustrates

the ambition and positive momentum at the national and district scale of government to develop integrated

financing strategies and mechanisms blending diverse sources of capital (national, international, public,

private) to invest in FLR. The development of FONERWA (Rwanda’s Green Fund), a “ground-breaking

environment and climate change investment fund” (as described on their website) is an ideal example of a

country working to capture multiple benefits of FLR.

Many who were interviewed underscored the fact that no simple one-size-fits-all road map exists for unlocking

FLR finance. They reiterated that it is time consuming, requires significant additional support from national

governments, agroforestry commodity supply chains, the financial sector and FLR champions. Many describe

how the nature of the challenge has fundamentally changed from convincing key decision makers that FLR is

valuable to responding to the massive demand to both fund it and fully implement it. While there are a growing

number of finance mechanisms such as development cooperation resources, climate finance, state budgets,

environmental funds, resources from non-governmental organisations (NGOs), private sector (for-profit and

not-for-profit), and even crowd funding, the challenge of unlocking finance is complex. One interviewee noted,

“without KNOWFOR it’s hard to imagine we would have played such a critical role in (developing) ROAM and

other great advances in starting to learn how to unlock finance for FLR.” (#15)

http://www.fonerwa.org/

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Table 1. Growth of IUCN FLR portfolio with KNOWFOR contribution (data provided by IUCN KNOWFOR team)

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4. Findings and Implications

4.1. Impact Pathways: Role of ROAM in Unlocking Finance

Evidence points to the development of ROAM as a “game-changer” in providing critical knowledge pathways to

equip decision makers to engage with FLR including how to unlock finance for implementation. While it is not

the only approach, as some partner countries (e.g., Brazil, India) use their own methods to guide FLR analysis,

it is an important core method developed in part with KNOWFOR funds. According to those interviewed, ROAM

was first developed through a €0.6 million grant secured by IUCN in 2011 from the German Government for a

project entitled “Assessing and Capitalizing on the Potential to Enhance Forest Carbon Sinks through Forest

Landscape Restoration while Benefitting Biodiversity.” As the German funding ended, KNOWFOR funding

supported the further development of ROAM into a methodology based on work in Ghana, Mexico and Rwanda

and which was field-tested elsewhere. While financing FLR is logically the closing chapter in ROAM, it was

considered by many who were interviewed as the most important issue that decision makers and

intermediaries were facing once the evaluation process is completed:

“In most cases, the question of funding comes up immediately. [Decision makers] recognise the fact

that unless they have a business plan or business case, they can’t go to any agency, even their own

national agencies. So that’s why there’s a greater buy in for assessments, because it helps them to

make a credible case. We have done this analysis, we have looked at it, like the Malawi example, the

Ministry wants a greater share of funding, so they said, ‘Okay, we’ll have a restoration plan, and it will

be a forest restoration plan, that’s important, but we want it to meet other objectives.’ They wanted it

to be multi-sector, targeted to food security, [rather] than run only by the forest department, so they

could get a greater share of FLR funding whether if it’s domestic or if in the future it goes to a

multinational, bilateral agency, but if they have a plan in place as a national mandate, that helps.

(#14)

ROAM is a clear and structured, stakeholder-driven approach that can generate a quantifiable direction for FLR

opportunities. Importantly, the process is landscape focussed, tailored to local conditions, examines multiple

benefits, and is responsive to local needs. In other words, the process is driven by the demands of national

partners, based on collaborative design and co-production of knowledge that generates relevant and useful

information for decision makers. As it relates to financing FLR, the ROAM process examines opportunity costs

of (crop yields, timber revenue, other forms of development), transaction costs (site selection, management

planning, land purchase, compensation, infrastructure), and implementation costs (on-going management,

compensation, monitoring and maintenance). Several noted the linkage to KNOWFOR during the interviews

and the importance of ROAM as follow through on the political will generated as summarised below:

“ROAM would not have been possible without KNOWFOR, there's no doubt in my mind… there's this

political enabling environment at the international level that KNOWFOR allowed… ROAM has become a

movement, a groundswell where now [we] get more requests for support than [we] can possibly

handle… The worst thing you can do in a policy environment is to create hype around an issue but not

be able to help someone once there is political will and financial means. If you can't help people follow

through on that, that's the worst outcome, it’s a waste of political will, which is the hardest thing to

find, and financial will, which is the second hardest thing to find.” (#9)

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ROAM Identifies Roadblocks to FLR: Essential for Unlocking Finance

The ROAM process surfaces major roadblocks to implementation, which greatly influences the scope of

financing for FLR. This reality check equips decision makers with the major issues that may need to be dealt

with before or during FLR implementation such as drivers of land degradation, land tenure, forest restoration

infrastructure (i.e. tree nurseries and seed production systems), which can influence planning for unlocking

FLR finance. The ROAM process also examines existing agroforestry supply chains of current and potential

commodities (i.e. oil palm, cacao, shea, tea, bamboo, leather, etc.) and examine incentives and subsidies that

may both support FLR or contribute as a driver to deforestation. This work has deepened engagement between

small-scale producers and international corporations, which can contribute to unlocking financing to support

FLR implementation. The establishment of a private sector network supporting the implementation of the Bonn

Challenge is an example:

“In June 2016 a group of ‘private sector champions’ met to discuss the opportunities and role of the

private sector in delivering FLR actions on the ground and helping achieve the Bonn Challenge. This

core group is now working on expanding the network of FLR champions to strengthen this partnership.

An important factor in this endeavour is that a major UK-based company approached IUCN about

partnering on the Bonn Challenge, rather than the other way around… Asia Pulp and Paper [APP] is the

first private sector company to pledge to the Bonn Challenge with a restoration commitment of 1

million hectares… other private sector companies like Kingfisher, The Body Shop, SCA, and Kimberly-

Clarke are interested in exploring how FLR could contribute to their sustainability goals.”6

While still under development, ROAM is a knowledge generating process to better understand how to create

the enabling framework for restoration finance through a customised and scalable decision support tool. Many

describe how ROAM has evolved to better identify how financing will generate returns, create benefits at the

sub-national scale, and accelerate action on national and international goals such as Intended Nationally

Determined Contributions (INDC’s) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change as well as Aichi

targets etc. An output of ROAM includes cost/benefit estimates for FLR by modelling economic benefits and

ecosystem services provided by restoration and integrates that knowledge with a diagnosis of political, legal

and institutional barriers. This information feeds the analysis of investment and financing mechanisms and

options to generate recommendations for mobilising funding for the implemenbtation of FLR.

ROAM & Unlocking Finance: Still Under Development

While unlocking finance for FLR is a major goal of ROAM, the learning curve has been steep. Several

interviewed noted that the financial aspect is still in development and will take time:

“Some of the early ROAM work touched on finance, but it didn't really get into it in a significant way… if

we were going to be able to work and support governments, particularly governments, and start to

implement national or subnational restoration strategies, it wasn't good enough to just identify the

areas of costs/benefits … it was very important to really look at the institutional policy bottlenecks and

opportunities across different sectors. That was a piece of work that hadn't been done before, but

even with that we still needed to actually really tap into the finance conversation.” (#10)

“I think actually ROAM isn't particularly strong on investment finance at the moment. It's done some

cost-benefit analysis, that's one key bit. It starts interesting conversations about where you invest and

how do you invest. I think those are still very early equations that we need to get better at. The thing

about ROAM is that it does have the right conversations.” (#7)

“To an investor, the Rwanda ROAM report was great, but I think [FLR Partners] were expecting

investment decisions being made on the back of it. But it was completely unrealistic. We are just

beginning to develop the right story and the right proposition for investors, it takes years.” (#4)

6 2016 Annual Report by IUCN to DFID.

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Early Stage ROAM Matters for Unlocking Finance

Evidence suggests that the early stage of the ROAM process may be important for setting the proper tone and

engagement process needed to review national policy and mandate to better unlock finance.

“At that early stage [of ROAM] it's impossible to anticipate the mix of public and private [investment in

FLR] that would be recommended at the end. There's no doubt that early and ideally high-level

engagement pre-ROAM, or even in the formulation of a commitment to the Bonn Challenge, or even

just to get people thinking about the restoration opportunity. There's no doubt that early engagement

with key actors makes a huge, huge difference. You would not want to go into a country and do a

ROAM where we didn't have that. We want to be sure before we get started, the knowledge generation

if the findings are going to be embedded in official decision-making processes.” (#8)

ROAM is a process that is adaptive and identifies who needs to be involved in the process iteratively.

“It's always important to have the right people, but I do think that ROAM, you can start with the wrong

people, but ROAM can bring in the right partners into the process… it's scalable in its methodology,

because it's adaptable to local situations. A specific intervention to restore land is never scalable in

and of its own. Because you don't know where to do that, having a [global] blueprint for something is

never the answer because it's not going to be applicable everywhere. [National leaders] are not going

to feel they own that or believe in that, or it's meeting any of their national objectives. Yes, they all

have to do [National Biodiversity Strategic Action Plans] NBSAPs, and INDCs, but they also have their

own goals… [such as] a 30% increase on energy and 30% forest cover. ROAM can deliver on both.”

(#15)

Where does ROAM End Regarding Unlocking Finance?

Once a ROAM technical process is completed, a detailed report is published that contains a knowledge base

intended to support the decision-making for where to conduct FLR and for leveraging investments and

mobilising resources for implementation. ROAM is designed to targets areas for restoration that make financial

sense and produce a range of benefits using multi-criteria analysis. A key question arises: where does ROAM

end? While the results are given to the national partners, the role of technical partner is in greater demand to

implement recommendations, which are often policy and governance reform at the national/subnational scale

and looking at issues such as payment for ecosystem services (e.g. carbon sequestration). Several interviewed

emphasised that KNOWFOR contributed to this evolution to further develop ROAM and better understand

policy/political windows of opportunity such as linking FLR implementation to nationally determined

development strategies, INDCs, and movement down-scale to get closer to district/state-scale policies and

landowner decisions regarding local land-use:

“A critical step after ROAM [is to ask] how it fits in with nationally determined medium term

development strategies and of course linking those to some of the big international issues around

climate change and etc., identify how restoration fitted in there, what were the key strategies that

made sense in a country… being able to run economics then doing actually detailed institutional policy

analysis on that, so ROAM really opened up those opportunities.” (#10)

“At national level there is an end. A national level ROAM can only look like [implementing the

methodology and generating a report]. At sub-national levels it will look different again, and that's

where you get your business models and the bankable projects based on national ROAM

assessments… You can get to the level of having large strategies on public-private financing, but at the

level of, for example, a farmer, you're not going anywhere with a national level ROAM on business

models and bankable stuff.” (#15)

Responding to windows of opportunity that emerge after ROAM has been implemented creates capacity

challenges further complicated by increasing demand in other countries to start new ROAM processes. This

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capacity conundrum is one of several issues facing IUCN and partners who have developed a successful

process that is in high demand. Indeed, several who were interviewed noted that demand for pre-ROAM

activities are increasing which stimulates the demand for the ROAM process, which often leads to increased

demand for post ROAM support. Capacity to run multiple parallel processes is an issue that can influence

quality of delivery and service. One staff noted the need for partner countries to collaboratively invest in the

process to enhance the results with existing partners.

“It's a huge issue. We can't handle [the demand for ROAM and FLR]… It's not just the demand for

doing [ROAM]. It's also the quality delivery on it. The more [countries] can invest in it the better the

results are.” (#15)

Innovation and ROAM 2.0

Facing increased demand for the ROAM decision-support process and the massive challenge of financing

implementation of FLR, KNOWFOR support has allowed IUCN to further develop the method and delivery

process. KNOWFOR support contributed to a growing partnership with the Environmental Leadership & Training

Initiative (ELTI) with the Yale School of Forestry, working with IUCN to develop a set of training modules on

‘Forest Landscape Restoration in the Tropics’ and featuring more in depth training to leverage and unlock

finance. According to IUCN staff involved in this training, a new set of training modules on unlocking finance

for FLR is now under development and will be tested in 2017. The summer 2016 brochure features the

importance of unlocking finance in its opening paragraph:

“Participants are invited to explore the social, economic, biological, and policy processes that shape

FLR in tropical regions. During the course, participants will learn how FLR opportunities can be

identified, analysed and prioritised, using the ROAM, as well as discuss strategies to unlock finance

and scale up FLR.”7

The demand for ROAM and FLR is on a steep increase and the need to train others to implement is just one

part of the solution. As one IUCN staff noted, trainings are building capacity in key partners to implement

ROAM:

“There have been ROAM trainings in the last CBD COP, there are ROAM trainings that will be under

SER [Society for Ecological Restoration] and actually some of them are now being done by the World

Bank. The World Bank took the first ELTI IUCN course and are now giving ROAM trainings to

TerrAfrica... How cool is that? That started with KNOWFOR... you have to see it as a multiplier effect”

(#15)

4.2. Knowledge Flow for Unlocking Finance: Case of Rwanda

While there are many examples where countries are working to unlock finance for FLR in highly context specific

ways (i.e. Brazil, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, Malawi, Uganda, Mozambique etc.), Rwanda is

examined in more detail here because of the progress made in building enabling conditions. Like all case

examples, there is no simple blueprint or road map, each country has unique challenges and no single

example is sufficient in the analysis of unlocking finance for FLR. Several people referred to this challenge as

“building a bridge” to unlock finance with the architecture rooted in a collaborative process and deep

understanding of local context. Thus, Rwanda provides insight into the holistic and multidimensional nature of

the type of “bridge” that is needed for unlocking finance to implement FLR.

7 ELTI Brochure for Online Training Course, May 23-July 3, 2016. http://elti.yale.edu/programs

http://elti.yale.edu/

http://elti.yale.edu/

http://www.ser.org/

http://terrafrica.org/

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Recent history in Rwanda that examines drivers of deforestation, commitment to reforestation and the impact

of the ROAM process is well documented in the February 2015 Episode Study that “Traces the Influence”8.

Several important issues bear repeating here as they serve as the scaffolding for the bridge. First, forests are

important to the cultural and spiritual tradition in Rwanda and the process of restoration is more than just

building ecological infrastructure. It is building hope for a society that has endured unimaginable hardship from

recent civil war that has been linked to the scarcity of renewable resources, such as arable cropland, fish

stocks, fuel wood, and potable water supplies9. Second, land-use is central to the future of Rwanda as there

are over 12 million people living on less than 25,000 Km2. Rwanda has the highest population density in Africa

at 493 per km2. Third, the nation has identified barriers to reforestation such as unclear land tenure and made

proactive steps of reform such as a land registration process and a cadastral system. Fourth, national policies

link restoration of forests with the future health of the country such as the Economic Development and Poverty

Reduction Strategy (EDPRS 1 and 2) and Vision 2020. These factors were identified in the interviews as key

enabling conditions that contributed to FLR:

“Land registration and land reform is a pre-requisite for an investor. We knew we had to have very

clear land tenure issues clarified. For Rwanda that is a very big starting point for an investor and now

land tenure is very clear, all the land in the country is registered, you now know who has the land title

and who manages what in the public and the private, the small owner, the medium and the bigger

size.”(#19)

“In 2011, Rwanda made an ambitious pledge to the Bonn Challenge to restore 2 million hectares of

forest and agricultural land, establishing itself as a global leader in the restoration movement.

Rwanda’s pledge represents a significant commitment to both its people and environment by

recognizing the value of the goods and services provided by landscapes and also providing a platform

for Rwanda to achieve many of the goals outlined in EDPRS 2 and Vision 2020.” (#10)

“People of Rwanda are attached to our land and natural resources. We don’t have much gold and

diamonds; our land is precious and supports the primary source of livelihoods for 80-90% of our

population. Land is precious here. There is this tradition of ‘let’s plant trees, every year!’… But the

multiple benefits of a landscape approach was not yet grasped. Bringing together the many leaders

such as the Minister of Infrastructure to see how the landscape includes roads, markets, hospitals the

big infrastructure was critical. We brought in the Minister of Agriculture and water resources to see

how the landscape protects the wetlands and watersheds. Looking at this through a landscape

approach [through ROAM] was an important aspect that has changed the public investment way to

understand this.” (#19)

Additional resources were mobilised to collaboratively develop FLR. Funding from the German Government

($188,000 from the International Climate Initiative) was secured to support a Rwanda Feasibility project in

2013. These resources helped to implement ROAM and were the early steps to “build the bridge” to unlock

finance. A central recommendation of the ROAM report was to establish a public private partnership (PPP) “to

coordinate investment and mobilise commitments for action across the board range of actors needed to

8 This report presents a study and account of the adoption of FLR ‘ROAM’ assessment recommendations by

the Government of Rwanda in partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and

the World Resources Institute (WRI). Written by Clear Horizon Consulting 129 Chestnut Street, Cremorne VIC

3121

9 Percival, Valerie and Thomas Homer-Dixon (1996). “Environmental Scarcity and Violent Conflict: The Case of

Rwanda,” Journal of Environment and Development, Vol. 5, No. 3, September 1996 270-291.

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implement and fund landscape restoration.”10 To this end, KNOWFOR provided a solid foundation for IUCN

staff to develop proposals and seek further financing ($3.8 million) from the German Government as

“Investment Packages Rwanda”11. A key goal of this “boots on the ground” project was to implement ROAM

recommendations including unlocking finance, with a specific focus on private sector investment. As one IUCN

staff noted:

“The KNOWFOR project money becomes a leverage financing… a lot of what we did under KNOWFOR

(was) to build proposals for more specific and less flexible things. I think in part it was the way that we

designed the programmatic approach within the forest program and how we leveraged and stacked

financing… KNOWFOR investments led to a BMU feasibility study, which led to a free-standing,

German-Rwandan project.” (#9)

Building A Bridge

Part of “building the bridge” is to better understand needs, motivations and behaviour of how people use the

forest. One IUCN staff noted that it is not uncommon for people to use the forest as a bank. If they need

wood, they will go to the forest and make a withdrawal. When money is needed to pay for medical expenses or

school fees, they may make more withdrawals from the forest to then sell the firewood and generate revenue…

“…let's find an alternative for them, not to the forest for the bank. Let's find a bank for them to go to.

In Niger, we started something called Village Savings and Loans Associations. Now the Village Savings

and Loans have been incredibly successful. In the last 20 years it's just gone viral across the

continent. Currently in Rwanda there are about, I think, 22,000 Village Savings and Loans

Associations with about half a million members. This is an important detail, because this is the

platform that we want to use for some of our community-level financing. This is part of the bridge. This

is one foundational block of the bridge across to the international investors.” (#7)

Considering the demand side of investment at the scale of the landowners is a key aspect of “inclusive

finance” so that programmes are designed for people with the greatest economic needs, not just large

landowners who are also an important target for FLR. Understanding the needs of both the wealthy landowners

and those in more precarious financial conditions is central to inclusive finance. As one noted:

“We're trying to build a bridge from the private sector, and when people think of private sector

investors they think of the guy sitting in London and New York, sitting on stacks of cash that they want

to make money on. We, in our project, take a much broader view of the investor from the individual

householder who is putting their land, is putting their time, and often putting their money into

restoration. They're not necessarily convinced themselves that this is a good investment for them.

They're hand-to-mouth, probably extremely poor, many of them living on less than one or two dollars a

day, so we view those people as investors as well.” (#7)

10 Ministry of Natural Resources – Rwanda (2014). Forest Landscape Restoration Opportunity Assessment for

Rwanda. MINIRENA (Rwanda), IUCN, WRI. viii + 51pp.

11 The full title of the project is: Piloting Multiple-Benefit Investment Packages through Forest/Landscape

Restoration and REDD+ in Rwanda for Scaling Up in Africa. IUCN was the implementing organization with

several national partners Ministry of Natural Resources (MINIRENA); Ministry of Agriculture and Animal

Resources (MINAGRI); Ministry of Local Government (MINALOC); Rwanda Agricultural Board.

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To develop more inclusive finance, KNOWFOR contributed to a process that many who were interviewed regard

as a scalable solution. Working with Rwanda's climate change fund (FONERWA), consultant Net Positive

Solutions and Kenya’s F3 Life, IUCN staff developed two financial instruments. The first is a performance-

based land-use planning model, which is incentivised by a revolving fund called the Community Environmental

Conservation Fund (CECF). The CECF was an innovation from the Village Savings and Loan model in Uganda.

“In a sense it provides a community land-use planning tool that then can be linked to a number of

value chains such as beans or maize, timber, or shea trees…That incentivised land-use planning tool

can be used as a revolving fund, we're quite excited about this, because this innovation has protected

large areas of rivers... This revolving funding has sufficiently incentivised the community to actually

start managing their ecosystems and therefore their ecosystem services… which you can then start

asking, ‘what are the sustainable business value chains which could come out of this area’ such as

timber, agriculture, or oil...” (#7)

The second is called the Climate Smart Lending Platform (CSLP) built from a model developed in Kenya that

provides loans for landowners with conditions of sustainable reforestation practices. The initiative is seeking to

raise $20-30 million of investment finance and has received expressions of support from Deutsche Bank, the

Government of the Netherlands, and the World Bank.

“CECF and the CSLP, do different things at the ground level. The CSLP works on the slightly richer

farmer who can sustain a loan from the microfinance bank, paying off interest… whereas the

community revolving fund or the CECF, works with the poorer members of the community so they start

thinking, ‘I can actually invest in a tree,’ or ‘I buy a bit of land.’ We see at the community level a

financial architecture emerging, which all of these are the foundation blocks of this bridge that we're

trying to build. We're in the process of evolving in Rwanda, into this new incentive type models.” (#7)

The finance mechanism spectrum includes a wide range of options that the Rwandan team are examining with

“blueprints” and “road maps” for agroforestry, protected forests, woodlots and natural forests. The following is

an example of a potential value chain in furniture that would link private sector funding to FLR:

“Identifying the markets and the value chains with private sector entities, particular businesses who

might come in and say, ‘I want to look at furniture. I'm going to set up a factory in Rwanda. I'd like to

invest in a furniture factory. My value chain requires growing large quantities of teak or mahogany…

and I want to invest in that value chain.’ The farmer then has the opportunity to link to the business

and invest the land to grow teak, or the government has the opportunity to grow plantations and then

there's got to be a series of investors who do the transporting to buy, to process the timber and so on."

(#7)

Many of the ideas need to be further developed and “stress-tested.” Net Positive Solutions consultant Fraser

Brown has created a set of potentially viable financial blueprints that give structure to next steps but may

require a “doubling down” to fully realise their potential in Rwanda and scalability elsewhere. Thus, the

evidence gathered points to KNOWFOR’s contribution to the development of an IUCN team and partners who

are learning how to open an FLR finance market. They are identifying ways for banks to pool risk, work with

different asset classes and types, and make FLR a more attractive and sustainable investment. As one IUCN

senior leader noted,

“It's not just about the finance. It's about mobilising knowledge for policy and policy dialogs which then

moves forward and opens up finance opportunities. Recently in Rwanda the German Minister actually

asked to stop off and see this stuff in Rwanda, and the result of that was actually more mobilization of

further resources for the Rwandan government around some other specific issues such as the

http://www.f3-life.com/

https://www.iucn.org/content/community-environment-conservation-fund-cecf-tool-catalyze-water-resources-management-upper

https://www.iucn.org/content/community-environment-conservation-fund-cecf-tool-catalyze-water-resources-management-upper

http://climatefinancelab.org/idea/climate-smart-finance-smallholders/

http://www.netpositive-solutions.com/big-ideas

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rehabilitation of the tree-seed centre. All these things sort of cascade… I think it would be a very

different landscape if we hadn't been able to trigger a lot of that work. There would be still work

underway, but I don't think it would be as grounded and getting to the point where it can be demand

responsive if we hadn't had that KNOWFOR investment.” (#10)

Critical Support at the District Scale

The Rwanda experience reveals that to effectively unlock finance, there needs to be a nested system of

governance that is complimentary to support FLR. In two Districts, Gatsibo and Gicumbi, FLR is being piloted

as part of 5-year, annual and 6-month planning cycles. Harmonising national-scale priorities for FLR into

District Scale planning cycles is critical, as many who were interviewed noted, to get closer to the farmers and

landowners and develop innovation such as public private partnerships (PPP):

“FLR has been a flagship [project] at the District level, with clear policy statements in the District

Development plans and District Performance plans. This is a starting point before we actually talk

about public financing, if you have a specific objective into your public implementation plan, therefore

the public flow of finance is going to be obvious. So we have not yet tracked the money that the

government increased on this, but we have tracked the change in planning, the changes in the

policies, and that was in the course of only two years, so it has been so fast to see those changes. So

we hope to see in the next budget year, what was the increase and why and how do they link with the

national ROAM priorities.” (#19)

Currently, while there has been no PPP identified, progress is being made:

“Public private partnerships do not happen overnight... What we did since the ROAM was done has

been to map out what the PPP in FLR could look like and this led to a PPP in agroforestry, a PPP in

woodlots and we are exploring a PPP in protective forests… There are interest from investors in

hydropower generation, we realised that investing in hydropower infrastructure is one thing, but

protecting the water flow is another thing so by cooperating with an investor in hydropower generation

and the need to invest in protecting the river flows and a need to co-finance the process, the hydro

and the watershed, the hillsides around the river that protects the flow and keeps the erosion out of

the basin.” (#19)

Moving down to the District scale has also supported efforts to examine livelihoods and value chains more

closely and identify what could be “bankable” projects that have benefits for local communities and could

generate return on investment for investors:

“We have done a quick scoping of FLR value chains… These could include cooperative of beekeeping

and to do this they plant a large number of trees to attract bees. We are seeing interest in investing on

tree seed production for fruits and garden trees; we are seeing interest in improved charcoal

production and other wood products.” (#19)

Global Scale Opportunities

As shown on the timeline in Figure 1 below, the 3rd United Nations Conference on Financing for Development

was held in Addis Ababa Ethiopia in mid-July 2015. This conference was deemed a ‘paradigm shift’ by one

interviewee who described the shared ambition to scale up FLR and position it as sustainable ecological

infrastructure investments in developing countries. Discussions included ways to attract blended finance and

creating platforms where public and private entities can work together for co-investing in a pipeline of specific

projects.

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Figure 1: Timeline of selected events in Rwanda that relate to unlocking finance for FLR

Since the event in Ethiopia, Rwanda has been active in defining how to mobilise private sector investment and

share practical experiences. One participant described the meeting as a turning point for scaling up existing

initiatives and sharing existing knowledge, tools and new approaches to financing. For example, Rwanda has

experience in securing a green bond through lenders working with the African Development Bank. Together,

they have committed US$91.25 million to the development of a clean power project in Rwanda to reduce

emissions. Several who were interviewed described progress being made as well as the challenges. This is

summed up well in the following quote form an IUCN staff:

“We're trying to now bring groups to the table to start-up our investment. We don't have investment

yet. We don't have a private sector entity with a signed contract to say, ‘we're going to invest in

restoration,’ but we're getting very much closer to that and we're starting to identify some strong

mechanisms to achieve that.” (#7)

Kigali Declaration

KNOWFOR’s contribution to the progress of implementing FLR in Rwanda and across Africa is exemplified

through work leading up to and progress made during the recent meeting of the Africa High Level Bonn

Challenge Roundtable held in Kigali, Rwanda on 26-27 July 2016. Through KNOWFOR support, IUCN created a

knowledge synthesis document of progress in Africa on FLR and produced a white paper with the goal to better

equip decision makers from 13 African countries (ministers and government officials) in advance of the

meeting. Somewhat unexpectedly, all 13 countries adopted a declaration to reaffirm commitment to the Bonn

Challenge and implementing FLR. More recently, ministers of the Central African Forests Commission

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(COMIFAC) have now endorsed the Kigali Declaration12. Two IUCN staff close to the effort noted the importance

of the information and the critical nature of national mandates:

“We knew we needed some kind of white paper… it went out to all the participants. I do think one

output of it was probably that the discussions were more focussed. I think another one is that the level

of comfort that people had with the content of that paper helped to create this interest in having a

Kigali declaration, so that participating ministers decided they actually wanted a public affirmation of

their commitment to FLR, the Bonn Challenge. Whether or not their countries had made commitments

to the Bonn Challenge, they wanted to come together and make this public affirmation of support. The

declaration did take shape, was signed off on by everyone who participated… A couple of other

governments signed on afterwards. I think if we hadn't had the white paper we could have had some

interesting conversations at the event, but I'm not sure it would have been as focussed or it would

have been a great meeting of the minds.” (#8)

“That was a process that was convened by the East African community and Rwanda. They came from

different governments, and that was a decision by those governments and a mandate then handed

out by those governments. To me it's the international side of things. It's being able to really help try

and get things materialised on the ground, but it's also actually that national framing and the mandate

that actually comes with that.” (#10)

Restoring Hope

The process of unlocking finance for implementation in Rwanda has just begun. It is one of many models

emerging from other countries. One of the key lessons in unlocking finance is to be able to tell a compelling

story. In Rwanda, resource scarcity and population density are enduring challenges and the source of the

response can be found in the passion and commitment for restoration. As one interviewee remarked, restoring

the forest is central to restoring hope and may be central to the business case:

“When we talk about ecological functionality and human well-being, there is a close link between

forests and people. In our culture in Rwanda, there are huge issues around cutting a tree. There are

certain attachments to different species that you cannot cut. Some of our indigenous trees are also

linked with our beliefs, where we go for prayers, where we go for meeting our sisters and brothers.

There are attachment values, cultural values and spiritual values which are more human actually and

attached to FLR… Bringing back the nature is bringing back hope, it’s bringing back the country…

People’s hope enables them to plant and restore their landscapes, people’s hope helps them to plant

trees to bring back their nature into its functionality which in turn brings back hope.” (#19)

4.3. Critical Node of Influence: The GEF TRI Proposal/Project

In 2016 the GEF Council approved The Restoration Initiative Programmed in 10 countries: Cameroon,

the Central African Republic (CAR), China, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Guinea-Bissau, Kenya,

Myanmar, Pakistan, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Tanzania. The GEF will be contributing US$54 million

complemented by co-financing contributions in excess of US$200 million from other donors. According to the

IUCN 2016 report to DFID: “TRI works at multiple levels identifying relevant national policies and institutional

solutions and aligns them with FLR commitments while supporting the implementation of restoration and land

management projects on the ground.”13

12 https://www.iucn.org/news/kigali-declaration-forest-landscape-restoration-africa 13 2016 Annual Report from IUCN to DFID.

https://www.iucn.org/news/kigali-declaration-forest-landscape-restoration-africa

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This example illustrates the contribution of KNOWFOR that has “changed the conversation about restoration

and moved it higher on the global agenda”14 by engaging with key decision makers at the GEF to fund FLR, key

decision-makers at 10 countries willing to work together on FLR and, key decision-makers at two partner

organizations (FAO and UN Environment) who have agreed to collaborate with IUCN on the TRI and increasing

their global leadership. The work leading up to the development of the GEF TRI initiative exemplifies how

KNOWFOR contributed support to further develop knowledge pathways that fund and implement FLR as the

project exemplifies the shifting nature of knowledge needed to implement FLR. For success to be realised,

partners in TRI will contribute significantly to proving the hypothesis that FLR can produce multiple

international and domestic benefits, respond to specific goals and stimulate a broad range of finance

mechanisms that can be unlocked to meet those goals. TRI brings more countries into the FLR implementation

process, and serves as an action-learning arena for how to unlock finance. The TRI timeline in Figure 2 below is

presented as evidence of the factors that contributed to GEF supporting FLR on a global scale. KNOWFOR’s

contribution to this process is described below.

Figure 2: Timeline of the GEF TRI Proposal Development and Implementation

The Opportunity Emerged Unexpectedly

In early Spring 2015, IUCN held conversations with the GEF around raising awareness of the Bonn Challenge.

As one IUCN staff noted:

“Initially [we] went to see the GEF secretariat, and we went there with actually quite a simple request

saying, ‘the Bonn Challenge has been launched…when you get proposals coming in [to the GEF] that

have a restoration component, could you encourage the implementing agency and the country to think

about making a link to the Bonn Challenge.’ That was the initial discussion we were having with them.

They said, ‘Yes, this is interesting, but what about a programme on this here?” (#10)

14 https://www.iucn.org/fr/node/27099

https://www.iucn.org/fr/node/27099

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The Bonn Challenge II meeting, held on 21-22 March 2015 followed soon afterwards and featured opening

statements by Dr Naoko Ishii, the CEO and Chairperson of the GEF, and a welcoming statement by the recently

appointed Director General of IUCN (Inger Anderson), who made the economic/business case for FLR.

“Just before Bonn Challenge 2.0 in March 2015, which was a global high-level round table on the

Bonn Challenge, we decided to produce a paper on the economics of FLR, which also looked at the

economics from a climate change point of view… we didn't release it widely, but what we did do is use

it as the basis for our Director General's opening statement. She was able to start with these facts and

figures about the benefits of restoration… very important for bringing the climate change community

on board.” (#8)

The meeting was considered a great success in furthering international and national scale commitment to the

Bonn Challenge and also led to further meetings with the GEF. KNOWFOR contributed to this process as

evidenced by the following statement of a senior IUCN staff:

“There are not very many GEF forest programmes around… So, on the back of the Bonn Challenge 2.0

meeting, we spoke to GEF secretariat members... They came back and they said, ‘right, that's

fantastic, but we would need it delivered in around three months [rather than typical 8-12 month time

frame]. We would need a programme and a programme framework with child projects and that means

negotiating with countries, and it would be really well-received if you could bring some other GEF

implementing agencies into the execution of the programme’… It was KNOWFOR that gave us the

leverage to say, ‘well, okay we may not succeed, but we're definitely going to have a try on this here…’

We actually did mobilise some KNOWFOR money in direct support of pulling together this TRI

initiative.” (#10)

The effort required was described as ‘monumental’ to synthesise the learning that KNOWFOR and other donor

agencies had supported, identify country partners and define the collaborative terms of the implementing

partners of FAO and UN Environment. The proposal writing process helped to identify what new knowledge,

tools and methods were needed post-ROAM to implement FLR and further unlock finance. As shown in the GEF

TRI proposal development timeline in Figure 2 above, the proposal writing took place over a very brief period,

but set the framework for a novel approach. Two IUCN staff close to the effort noted the following:

“Even though we knew that there was GEF secretariat interest… we had to build a very solid case

about the global environmental benefits of restoration. We were able to draw on all sorts of analyses

that we had done in the past and put that together to build a convincing case… We had to persuade

them that FLR could deliver on the agendas of the GEF. At the same time, we were equipping

countries with information to help them see that they could achieve their domestic objectives as well

as tap into GEF funding by working on FLR, so approaching it from both ends.” (#8)

“We had to make the case and make sure to listen to [the interested country leaders]… some were

already restoration focussed, other ones had pieces of restoration [in their national strategy], and we

could say, ‘Okay, if you link up with this program, you're going to get all of these additional

programmatic benefits, and thus it might be a good reason for aligning with the programme’…. We

would send them three to five page summaries of the work that we were doing and a description of

the programme as we were seeing it built in real time.” (#6)

One interviewee described how KNOWFOR support to IUCN created the “political space which enabled

Myanmar to participate in this (TRI) programme.”15 While all 10 countries are obliged to have at least some

restoration activity as participants in the project, flexibility is designed in a broad land use context as noted by

an IUCN staff citing the example of securing China’s inolvement which was a major programmatic success:

“China was a case where they were pretty clear about what they wanted to do and were thinking about

doing it as a stand alone project. We said, ‘Okay, but if you join with the programme, the sum will be

15 2016 Annual Report on KNOWFOR by IUCN prepared for and submitted to DFID.

KNOWFOR Evaluation



far greater than the constituent parts’... It's a very broad framework… there's a lot that can be fit under

each of the four components of The Restoration Initiative.” (#6)

The back and forth with the GEF secretariat identified the importance of unlocking finance.

“We would have regular conversations with the GEF secretariat… they were very keen on learning

about mobilisation of finance from public and private sources.” (#6)

TRI is No Easy Task

In May 2015, IUCN received confirmation of which countries could be candidates for alignment with the

programme based on certain criteria, which made it possible for the IUCN team to put pen to paper. The

proposal was submitted less than 3 months later on 31 July 2015, in time for the GEF project cycle review. On

11 May 2016, the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel (STAP) of the GEF issued their response after a

detailed screening of the proposal16. While “fully supportive”, the STAP emphasised that implementing the TRI

proposal would be “no easy task” and proceeded to define the challenges:

“With such a wide mandate, TRI could, without the necessary programme framework, revert to a

collection of standard conservation forest projects… a danger that national projects may be

formulated locally with only superficial guidance from south-south exchanges, programme monitoring

systems, best-practice databases and other provisions of Component 4. The 10 countries involved

have very different approaches to science, project development and project implementation. Some

have good scientific support; others are weak. Some have top-down approaches to project design;

others have embraced participation by local stakeholder groups.”17

One IUCN partner was concerned that expectations for actual implementation of FLR should be carefully

managed given the short time frame:

“It's not about hectares on the ground. It should be about starting this dialogue, about making a case,

not just that [FLR] is just technically doable but the scale at which this needs to work is something that

we haven't really reached yet... Also, TRI needs to define the opportunities for restoration at scale and

what that offers to both public and private sector finance… what they could unlock should they go

down this path. I think the value of doing [TRI] is as a collective rather than as series of individuals,

we've got the momentum moving forward.” (#18)

Unlocking Finance for Implementation is KEY to TRI

Of the four major components of the TRI proposal, one was specifically dedicated to unlocking finance:

“Component 3 will focus on strengthening the capacity, reach, and effectiveness of national and sub-

national institutions essential to the successful implementation of restoration and sustainable land

management initiatives, and increasing the flow of sustainable finance, both public and private, into

16 IUCN comment: The programme was not recommended for inclusion into the 2015 work programme as

there was a shortfall in funding in the GEF Trust fund at the time due to a disconnect in the timing when

countries transferred their commitments to the GEF Trust fund and the actual date of the GEF Council meeting.

So there was a limited amount of funding and the work program that was approved was relatively small. The

next window for a programme was not until a year later. Also, the critical step that is missing is

recommendation by the GEF sec for inclusion in the work programme. The STAP screening is important but

doesn’t occur unless the program or project is recommended for inclusion in the work program. 17 Technical screening of the Project Identification Form (PIF) The Restoration Initiative made by The Scientific

and Technical Advisory Panel, administered by UNEP, who advises the Global Environment Facility.

KNOWFOR Evaluation



restoration and sustainable land management. Financing efforts will include a strong focus on

structures and products that promote engagement with the private sector.”18

This work will include further application and development of ROAM, but also a “Bonn Challenge Barometer”

and the promise of an “Enabling Investment Rapid Diagnostic Tool.” The STAP noted these as several

potentially innovative tools:

“STAP is glad to see that TRI will have a number of tools that will help unify the Program and enable

some consistency in introducing innovation and integration. ROAM features in the PFD as a systematic

appraisal of priority areas for restoration and possible interventions. Three other tools are mentioned

in the PFD and supporting documents – Bonn Challenge Barometer of Progress, Enabling Investments

Rapid Diagnostic Tool, and Typology of Forest and Landscape Restoration about which little is known

or available publicly.”19

While still early, progress is being made in the diagnostic tool as described by a partner in the TRI project:

“The Enabling Investment Rapid Diagnostic Tool is a way for countries to assess how friendly their

policy environment is for mobilising finance for FLR. We don’t have the tool as such ready now, we are

trying to understand what are the different components that such a tool would have we are in the

process of building the skeleton that would be shared with the national child projects as part of the

overall guidance on finance that we will be providing for countries so that we have an iterative type of

project between the global and national projects for testing how the tool will look and support

countries more effectively.” (#20)

Central to the design of TRI were formal restoration finance events as well as more informal matchmaking

toward “bankable proposal development”:

“We’re going to have two restoration finance events… where we're going to bring together interested

financiers. They can be people from banks, people from other kinds of social impact funding, things

like that, but we're going to try and really make these very inclusive events and bring in the right

people and connect them directly with opportunities in countries, so there's going to be a lot of

preparation, hopefully in-country, to prepare countries to be able to approach investors with

opportunities. Part of that is the bankable proposal development. But it also just might be bringing

together different kinds of assessments that have been done in countries saying [to prospective

investors], ‘There's been these kind of returns or these kinds of risk profiles. Here's the kind of needs

that our country has in terms of FLR. Here's the kind of opportunities we have,’ and so on.” (#6)

IUCN is working closely with UNEP who is leading much of the finance side of TRI. The partners are working

together to learn exactly what types of activities are being envisioned by the country partners and help identify

challenges that may be blocking different kinds of finance flows.

“The key issue is what exactly are the activities that are going to be done and promoted as a result of

TRI. Once you have a clear understanding of the activities, then you start looking at how you can build

potential business models or bankable projects around them. And then you need to decide if those

activities are suitable for private actors or if there is more scope for engaging with development

18 IUCN, UNEP and FAO Proposal submitted to GEF entitled The Restoration Initiative. Page 15. 19 Technical screening of the Project Identification Form (PIF) The Restoration Initiative made by The Scientific

and Technical Advisory Panel, administered by UNEP, who advises the Global Environment Facility.

KNOWFOR Evaluation



financial institutions… With some of the countries there may be very little scope for private

participation.” (#20)

Investment in Coordination

A critical component of the GEF TRI project is the inclusion of a coordination function that will be led by IUCN.

Referred to by one IUCN staff as, “the glue that binds all the projects together,” the global coordinating project

is considered central to unlocking finance at the country scale. This $3.8 million component of TRI, is designed

to support development of bankable projects, build capacity and share learning regarding financing FLR:

“This global coordinating project is a very important part of TRI because it's going to provide all of the

support for knowledge sharing, coordinating. It's the project that's going to also provide capacity

support for developing bankable proposals... It's very much getting a baseline of what's happening in-

country, what's the capacity to engage both with the private sector and public sector financiers

thinking about the environment for finance with in-country and what kinds of risks or risk mitigation

issuance might need to be part of any kind of package… It's very much a country led process, so we

don't want to be dictating what we think what they can and can't do. It's more about facilitating and

helping them figure out where the best opportunities are, particularly with TRI.” (#6)

In Hawaii on 3 September 2016, during the IUCN World Conservation Congress, Dr. Naoko Ishii (CEO, GEF)

publicly launched TRI, a particular distinction that is not common for GEF projects or programmes. She outlined

three notable characteristics of TRI: (1) its strong knowledge exchange component; (2) its goal to address

concrete policy and institutional barriers on the ground; and (3) its focus on developing business models to

leverage private finance to address FLR issues. Ishii also highlighted the Bonn Challenge, stating, “[It] has

changed the conversation about restoration and moved it higher on the global agenda.”20

On 31 October through 2 November 2016, IUCN led the TRI kick-off workshop in Douala, Cameroon. Over fifty

country representatives and team members attended representing all ten countries. A common vision for TRI

was created to help shape ongoing development of TRI. This event put a major focus on the work that is

needed with regard to unlocking finance. According to one IUCN staff member:

“This was very much about knowledge sharing, bringing folks together, having a country-led or

stakeholder-led process… There is there still is a good deal of work for us to do to increasing

understanding within the stakeholders on the finance piece in TRI, so just really understanding how

that's going to play out and what kinds of support we're going to give through the global projects,

through the financial projects, how they need to engage on that. That was one of the strong takeaways

from the workshop that we still have a bit of work to do on that [unlocking finance] component.” (#6)

GEF TRI is the Development of the Knowledge Pathway After ROAM

The evidence gathered confirms that the GEF TRI provides a process to develop the knowledge pathway after

ROAM. The GEF TRI project examines the challenges of implementation of FLR and the basic assumptions and

critical needs for unlocking finance. As one IUCN staff noted:

“We plan to mobilise some of the country project partners at regional events such as global

landscapes forum… and organize specific restoration finance sessions so (country partners) can be

exposed to some of the thinking of the financiers of FLR. To understand what are the drivers and

motivation of the financiers and what is it that they are looking for when they consider investing in a

project. But we need to go beyond that… As a result of the development of the bankable proposals we

are thinking about gathering a number of impact fund financial institutions and other commercial

banks and then have bankable proposals being presented to financiers with the hope that at least a

20 https://www.iucn.org/fr/node/27099

https://www.iucn.org/fr/node/27099

KNOWFOR Evaluation



couple spark interest between financiers and project proponents. We are thinking of doing that with

private and public sector financiers.” (#20)

Examples of potential impact funds are being developed by staff linked to TRI finance from UN Environment

and include the following: Althelia Climate Fund; Moringa Fund; Livelihoods Carbon Fund; Livelihoods 3f;

EcoEnterprises Partners II; EcoEnterprises Partners III; TerraBella Fund; Permian Global Fund; BioCarbon

Partners; Grupo Ecos; Arbaro Fund; EcoPlanet Bamboo; eco.business Fund; Commonland Fund; Pacific Agri

Capital; 33 Forest Capital; Africa Agriculture and Trade Investment Fund; Nisaba Fund; The Forestry

Microfinance and Development Fund; Madagascar Climate Conservation Fund; and, Tropical Asia Forest Fund.

4.4. Unexpected Outcomes in Unlocking Finance for FLR

Securing funding through GEF for TRI was a positive outcome that featured KNOWFOR as it contributed directly

to the staff time of people and a consultant working on the proposal. The following is a brief summary of

additional unexpected outcomes that link to Key Evaluation Question #1.

Significant Increase in New Pledges to the Bonn Challenge and INDCs

Through KNOWFOR support, IUCN contributed significantly to equipping decision makers with information that

in turn contributed to a range of diplomatic successes, unexpected in terms of scale and magnitude as

described in the companion Performance Story on the Bonn Challenge21. The number of pledges for the

restoration of forest lands, agricultural lands, and protective land and buffers doubled from 19 to 38 since the

2015 Conference of the Parties (COP) held in Paris to over 124 million hectares. High-level events that IUCN

participated in, and often led, provided significant behind the scenes flow of knowledge that enabled an

unexpected degree of formal commitment. According to the IUCN website, in 2016, 18 million hectares were

pledged at the Paris Climate Summit, 11.5 million hectares at the Africa High-Level Bonn Challenge

Roundtable, with additional commitments made at the roundtable for Bonn Challenge Latin America in

Panama, and the World Conservation Congress in 2016.22 As noted above, the Kigali Declaration reinforced

commitment to FLR by 14 African countries, which was augmented by further support during meetings of the

African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) and Initiative 20x20 in Latin America. Furthermore,

114 parties since 2015 have submitted their INDCs to the UNFCCC including targets for restoration with

pledges estimated over 160 million hectares.23 A senior official at IUCN describes this and the remarkable

achievement of the New York Declaration of Forests:

“What was unexpected definitely, and again this was built up with the work that started to happen with

KNOWFOR support, was the adoption and assimilation of the Bonn Challenge into the Secretary

General's process in 2014, which led to the New York Declaration of Forests and the prominence of

landscape restoration got there and the extension of the Bonn Challenge out to 2030. We absolutely

didn't anticipate that. We were still struggling saying, ‘… 150 million hectares is a lot to get done.”

(#10)

21 Blomley, T. (in review 2017) Performance Story Report: Exploring IUCN’s influence on the development and

growth of The Bonn Challenge. Acacia Natural Resource Consultants.

22 International Union for Conservation of Nature. Bonn challenge approaches target to restore 150 million

hectares of degraded land. [Online] 2016. https://www.iucn.org/news/bonn-challenge-approaches-target-

restore-150-million-hectares-degraded-land. 23 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Intended Nationally Determined Contributions

(INDCs). [Online] 2016. http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/indc/Submission%20Pages/submissions.aspx.

KNOWFOR Evaluation



Another IUCN staff working close to the process describes how the scale of the implementation challenge has

fundamentally changed and been made more challenging from the impacts of climate change:

“We are talking about a different scale here. Until a few years ago, we were talking a lot about

restoration, and this was in terms of hundreds of hectares, thousands of hectares. Now we're talking

about millions of hectares and talking about the restoration on the landscape level... we have already

seen a lot of big impacts from climate change. A lot of places that used to grow crops, because of

climate change, can no longer. Now you are having a big problem. You have major droughts or major

flooding. FLR suddenly brings the climate change adaptation agenda to the fore and on a much wider

scale.” (#16)

Have Not Solved the Problem of Bankable Flow

As progress is being made with formal commitments to the Bonn Challenge and INDCs, the nature of the FLR

challenge has shifted to implementation and central to that is unlocking finance. While many close to the topic

appreciate the long-term time horizons needed to unlock finance, there was a consistent message from those

interviewed that unlocking finance is unexpectedly difficult.

The flow of combined bilateral and multilateral ODA committed to FLR projects, both within IUCN and across

the broader community, was somewhat unexpected in a positive way, with some estimates stating that it

“increased from US$548 million in 2013 to US$739 million in 2014” due largely to the doubling of bilateral

ODA commitments (from countries such as Norway, Germany and UK) with multilateral commitments actually

decreasing slightly.24 Support from philanthropic organisations such as the Children’s Investment Fund

Foundation (CIFF) and their investment in FLR in countries such as Brazil was unexpected and significant to

the development of further FLR work in Brazil that has become a showcase for exchange programs. Several

noted that KNOWFOR contributed to a better understanding of subsidies and incentives that encourage

deforestation, the scale of which was unexpected as a major driver of deforestation. This has led the ROAM

process to examine subsidies and incentives more closely and to document positive examples where

incentives and subsidies are being used to enhance reforestation, pointing to examples in Mexico (progress in

GDP based carbon trading, collaboration by three states to FLR on Yucatan Peninsula) and Guatemala

(national scale reform and incentives) as examples. One noted how KNOWFOR has opened the eyes of many

within the FLR movement around the unexpectedly large scale of private sector investment in reforestation

that is outside of well-intentioned progress to the Bonn Challenge:

“There is a huge amount of investment that is already happening, major companies, forest companies,

farmers invest money every single day on putting trees on the landscape, every single day.” (#13)

Many described the challenge of building private sector investment opportunities related to FLR as being

unexpectedly slow to develop:

“Everybody thinks that the private sector funding is going to come in and do what they need. However,

we oftentimes haven't created the conditions to attract private sector investment, and then in order to

create those conditions first of all, you need some analytical work. You need to understand what the

opportunities are… then there's still that middle step missing, which we're all working on, for which we

haven't found the miracle solution yet of how you create a bankable project that will attract external

private financing or even internal, smaller scale private financing.” (#8)

24 Climate Focus. 2016. Progress on the New York Declaration on Forests – Achieving Collective Forest Goals.

Updates on Goals 1-10. Prepared by Climate Focus in cooperation with the NYDF Assessment Coalition with

support from the Climate and Land Use Alliance and the Tropical Forest Alliance 2020.

KNOWFOR Evaluation



“We do want to definitely reach out to [the] private sector. We keep hearing over and over again that

there's a huge demand for FLR, and if we're really serious about meeting the Bonn Challenge and

other FLR objectives and development objectives that public sector finance is going to be able to

capture that. Yes, we are very much hoping to unlock pension funds and other kinds of patient capital

that's interested in a long-term stable return, we’re just not there yet.” (#6)

Accredited Entity to the Green Climate Fund

One noted that the KNOWFOR project “woke us up” to the role of unlocking finance and to the relationship to

the Green Climate Fund (GCF). The GCF, founded in 2010 within the framework of the UNFCCC, is a

mechanism to redistribute money to assist developing countries with adaptation and mitigation practices to

address climate change. During the implementation of KNOWFOR, IUCN became an Accredited Entity (AE) of

the GCF with the specific scope to undertake implementation functions for grants up to $50 Million in value.

“Our [IUCN] members and others look to us for convening, for tools, for credible knowledge. All of

those activities were enhanced and made possible on a greater scale by KNOWFOR. It wasn't like we

were doing something completely alien to the nature of IUCN. It meant that on FLR, we could be doing

more of that and doing it more effectively and in more places… Especially with the GEF programme, it

woke us up to what we actually could do as a GEF implementing agency, as an Accredited Entity of the

GCF, that our role could go beyond just bringing individual country projects, that we could be builders

of programmes. It enabled others to see it that way, too. I think the GEF investment in TRI will unlock

additional finance. Having the lead responsibility for the GEF programme should help to make the

Green Climate Fund see us in a more positive way, or even just to understand more about IUCN and

what we're capable of doing.” (#8)

4.5. Promising Practices

Additional noteworthy practices KNOWFOR contributed to that have equipped decision makers in unlocking

finance are presented here.

FLR Hubs as Learning Centres

Hubs are centralised locations that serve as a regional forum for learning about the process of implementing

FLR. In March 2016, Rwanda’s Minister of Natural Resources, Honourable Dr. Vincent Biruta, inaugurated an

FLR Hub during a celebration in Kigali, Rwanda, on International Forest Day. In the opening of the African

Regional Hub, he declared:

“Restoring our landscapes brings prosperity, security and opportunity. With FLR, we have seen

agricultural yields rise, and farmers in our rural communities diversify their livelihoods and improve

their well-being. FLR is not just an environmental strategy, it is an economic and social development

strategy as well, and we are committed to continue these endeavors and take them further.”25

Several who were interviewed noted the value of the Hubs as promising practices central to developing FLR.

These Hubs, they say, serve as a “bank” of expertise and capacity to implement the analysis of FLR (e.g. via

ROAM) to unlock financing for FLR implementation and capture learning at the local level:

“The support from KNOWFOR has been critical to building capacities in many developing countries and

regions not only of IUCN regional and country offices but also of boundary partners. It is critical to

25 IUCN Website: https://www.iucn.org/content/iucn-launches-regional-forest-landscape-restoration-hub-kigali-

rwanda

http://www.greenclimate.fund/partners/accredited-entities/ae-composition

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ensure that progress on FLR will continue even after KNOWFOR ends. The creation of regional FLR

hubs has been a really important step in that direction.” (#10)

“One of the best decisions that IUCN took from an FLR point of view is in the establishment of the

regional Hubs for a couple of reasons. There is a huge need for technical support for these countries

to understand and implement ROAM… The second is unlocking finance and the capacity building

needed to do that and the whole issue around facilitating cross sector policy discussions on landscape

restoration programming. There is a need for governments to work across ministries and task force

committees to engage everyone. The Hubs provide technical capacity for physical spatial data and

mapping, strong policy analysis to understand the drivers of degradation, and critically working on the

finance issues for shedding light on opportunities for investments, business cases, success of projects

in FLR, and also provided needed support in monitoring restoration… We need to build the capacity of

these Hubs and strengthen [them so they can] respond to the growing demand.” (#19)

“It's very hard to capture all the learning… these [ROAM] processes take about a year or longer, so

we're just at the end of some of those processes right now. Uganda's just completed it. Costa Rica,

Nicaragua, El Salvador. Malawi's now completed, Burundi will have a first stage, Cote d’Ivoire is more

or less done. That learning is coming now and the Hubs are critical for this.” (#15)

Web-Based Tools

A variety of promising practices are emerging, easily accessible through the web that will contribute to the

challenge of unlocking finance.

“The Bonn Challenge Barometer is looking at a particular piece of the FLR puzzle that's very much

focussed on tracking progress on restoration commitments… If you don't have a system like that that's

public and transparent and credible, sooner or later, those commitments aren't going to have any

credibility… It will track what's happening in the country on the policy scale, what's happening in

capacity development and knowledge to actually implement FLR, and what's happening on the

ground, both in terms of hectares under restoration and different kinds of benefits, biodiversity

benefits, social benefits… [The Bonn Challenge Barometer] will also track progress in unlocking

finance.” (#6)

In November 2016, IUCN launched a website that serves as an information hub (InfoFLR.org) to “capture and

consolidate information, news, analyses, resources, and ongoing updates on restoration initiatives around the

world. InfoFLR will feature a comprehensive package of information on more than 90 countries including

domestic targets, policies and programmes related to restoration; information on how restoration is dealt with

in their NDCs, National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans and other plans; and the status of

assessments to identify restoration opportunities, among other things.”26

Building Capacity and Momentum: FLR FORUMS & Exchanges

In September 2015, the Global Forest Landscape Restoration Forum was co-organised by IUCN. The event

brought together over 150 participants from 24 countries and built momentum for establishing a global

community of practice for FLR including resource sharing. Myanmar’s participation at the forum, for example,

led to their involvement in the GEF TRI project. IUCN has also co-organised several exchanges such as a one

that involved four countries (Brazil, China, Guatemala, and Indonesia) attended by 24 experts from the

26 Climate Focus. 2016. Progress on the New York Declaration on Forests – Achieving Collective Forest Goals.

Updates on Goals 1-10. Prepared by Climate Focus in cooperation with the NYDF Assessment Coalition with

support from the Climate and Land Use Alliance and the Tropical Forest Alliance 2020.

http://infoflr.org/

KNOWFOR Evaluation



government, civil society organisations, and research institutions. Unlocking finance for FLR was a main topic

of these exchanges.27

“The South-South learning exchanges made possible by KNOWFOR are providing tangible support to

countries in defining and implementing restoration commitments. The ones we have organised so far

have led to on-going communication between participants from different countries and parts of the

world.” (#14)

“In September 2015, IUCN worked with WRI and Imazon to organize an exchange visit for experts from

Brazil, China, Indonesia and Guatemala to Espírito Santo state to share experiences and knowledge,

form connections and learn how forest restoration can support a green economy and healthy society.

The participants learned about how the REFLORESTAR programme aims to improve the health and

resilience of Vitoria’s primary watershed while generating jobs and income opportunities through

payment for ecosystem services and funding for restoration.”28

4.6. Conclusion and Lessons Learned

As an episode study, this document outlines KNOWFOR’s contribution to policies that have led to equipping

decision makers linked to FLR implementation at three scales. At the global scale, while many factors have

contributed to GEF interest in FLR, we conclude that KNOWFOR’s flexibility allowed IUCN to work effectively

with GEF and partners to create a policy in support of global FLR. At the country scale, Rwanda illustrates the

policy shifts and decision-making needed at the national scale to harmonise investments and commitments to

FLR across the ministries and at the district scale. The Rwanda example also sheds light on the potential of

FLR to be viewed as infrastructure that can link to other domestic, regional and global goals such as INDCs,

Aichi targets and other priorities such as livelihoods and food security. At an institutional scale, IUCN’s

commitment to make FLR a major programmatic focus and success in securing additional resources can be

directly attributed to KNOWFOR’s support. This success is evidenced in the leveraged resources that have

been mobilised through securing grants such as the GEF TRI as well as other funding to total over $200 million

for FLR and IUCN’s growing leadership role in FLR.

In conclusion, the episode study provides evidence in support of the main hypothesis “that IUCN used its

unique combination of linkage to members, knowledge brokering, technical analysis and convening attributes

to play a critical role in the development and growth of FLR”. This is well supported through the many actions

across global, regional, national and subnational scales of securing commitments to FLR and now shifting

towards implementation of FLR. IUCN demonstrated continued engagement with the 1,300-strong

membership base and providing those interested in FLR with a pathway and knowledge flow to frame the

challenge of unlocking finance. The evidence gathered points to IUCN’s role as convenor of and contributor to

signature events including partners from governments, private sector and civil society in learning more about

the intracacies and opportunities of FLR. The commitment towards gathering evidence through design,

monitoring, and evaluation of the KNOWFOR work contributes to the validation of this hypothesis. As one IUCN

staff noted:

“KNOWFOR allowed IUCN to deepen our engagement with the private sector, producing knowledge

products to address emerging development issues and enhance the use of our DMEL. We developed

tools, thematic analysis, organisation of high-profile events, information platforms/websites, and

consultations within countries… It’s a lot of hard work getting people agreeing to a set of interventions,

you won’t see hundreds of peer-reviewed reports… we are intensively engaging with everyone, working

collectively to get their input and then going back to them for validation.” (#14)

27 2016 Annual Report by IUCN to DFID 28 2016 Annual Report by IUCN to DFID.

KNOWFOR Evaluation



The key evaluation questions have been addressed in detail and supported with evidence that KNOWFOR has

contributed to equipping decision makers and intermediaries in understanding the challenge of unlocking

finance for FLR. As the nature of the FLR challenge has shifted from securing commitment to FLR to

implementation, a new knowledge is needed that is sharply focussed on closing the implementation gap. This

work is being built on the contributions of KNOWFOR, which led to a greater programmatic commitment to FLR

implementation by IUCN.

KNOWFOR’s contribution to IUCN’s role as a trusted global technical partner will continue to unfold, as IUCN is

now an Accredited Entity (AE) of the GCF. As an AE of the GCF, IUCN can undertake implementation functions

for grants up to $50 Million in value which is a significant development for an institution that one partner noted

was “a little late to the party.” As one IUCN staff noted, “currently IUCN is working with several National

Designated Authorities on the development of a total FLR portfolio worth over 200 million in direct finance

alone.”

The following section summarises insights from lessons learned in unlocking finance.

The Nature of the Challenge Has Changed

The remarkable success in commitments and reaffirmation in the Bonn Challenge is illustrative of the fact that

KNOWFOR has enabled IUCN to join with a growing global movement and the collective realisation that the

nature of the FLR challenge has fundamentally changed. This shift was clearly stated in the concluding

remarks of the 2016 annual KNOWFOR report from IUCN to DFID:

“While there’s still a lot of work to be on FLR, we have seen a trend from having to answer questions

about ‘What is FLR?’ and ‘Why should we do it?’ to ‘How do we do it?’ We have also learned to

highlight and provide analysis on the role FLR can play in achieving domestic priorities and not just its

role in achieving international commitments. This shift is evident is our knowledge generation and

policy work. Landscape approaches and FLR are broadly accepted now, and commitments to

restoration are mounting. We firmly believe we would not have secured more than 100 million

hectares of commitments with real prospects for implementation behind them without the knowledge

engine KNOWFOR has provided. The credible and substantial body of work, be it analytical or thematic

and the development and application of tools have built confidence in FLR and enabled us better to

mobilise IUCN's global network of offices, members, and partners.”29

Restoration as Infrastructure

Increasingly, several noted, the language around FLR is moving towards “restoration as infrastructure.” This

language reflects the nature of the learning that is occurring from increasing engagement with the private

sector and crafting a common language. Working with large-scale national and international commodity supply

chains is not new, but FLR provides a growing interest as a potential asset class by linking landscape scale

restoration to issues such as sustainable water supply and renewable energy. The example of the municipality

of Extrema in the state of Minas Gerais Brazil is illustrative of the effect that one municipality can have on the

fate of the region. According to one IUCN staff member familiar with the project, leaders in Extrema enacted a

simple law that provided funds for farmers to protect the forests. It was relatively low cost and generated

positive benefits, so other municipalities in the watershed passed similar laws. This led to watershed scale

restoration and the laws were further adopted by other municipalities to where, as one IUCN staff described:

29 2016 Annual KNOWFOR Report Prepared by IUCN for DFID.

KNOWFOR Evaluation



“Suddenly, private investments such as Sony invested in that municipality, because they felt very

confident that, even though Sony does not really depend on water for their business, they felt that the

governance around that municipality was safe enough for them to really feel comfortable putting their

investment there... so they invested $200 million there to build a factory. Then it was another

company that came and they were interested to offset their carbon footprint. All the money continued

to go to restoration, and now they have a 20-year vision to reach 30% of land cover.” (#16)

Other examples of engagement with the private sector that were gathered through interviews with IUCN staff

and partners include:

Implementation of a participatory and community-based planning that catalysed the formation of an

alliance of governments, civil society organisations, student associations and the private sector

focussed on FLR in specific regions (example in Guatemala).

Analysis of water yield, sediment retention and the potential for vegetation regeneration for

hydroelectric dams - socio-economic analyses were carried out on investment opportunities,

opportunity costs and cost-benefit tradeoffs. Economic models were proposed, and an assessment of

carbon sequestration potential was undertaken (examples in Brazil).

The development of a Green Finance Academy in the Netherlands to build capacity to access private

sector finance for projects. The academy features a five-day course to “transform current or new

projects into bankable projects that generate financial returns for investors. The Green Finance

Academy (GFA) is a partnership between IUCN NL, Alterra Wageningen UR, and Nyenrode Business

Universiteit.”30

The Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Project (CFLRP) in the United States that features a

public partnership with the US Forest Service and The National Forest Foundation to assist the

organizations, people, and communities involved in the CFLR program.

The Partnerships for Forests organisation that helps to develop investment models that are linked to

sustainable land use such as FLR that can support to commodities like shea oils, cacao, tea, leather

products and bamboo.

Progress in developing “blueprints” for funding FLR (example in Rwanda) for private impact funds for

FLR and attracting different kinds of investors, including institutional investors, cooperation agencies,

high-net-worth individuals, pension funds and private foundations, among others.

Development of key messages and data visualisations that examine sustainable finance for FLR such

as partial guarantee of risk linked to FLR and the need for investments as a pre-requisite to attract

investors. Further development of innovative data graphics are considered by many who were

interviewed as central to the challenge to unlocking finance.

Building on and learning from the examples of large-scale ecosystem restoration projects such as the

Loess Plateau in China, Tigray Region in Ethiopia, Atlantic Forest Restoration in Brazil to name a few.

Several noted the urgent need to add to these examples.31

The potential for FLR-type bonds that build on the concept of green bonds as innovative financing

instruments in which the issuance of the bond is linked to incentives for small-scale landowners and

farmers to restore land on a large scale, e.g. through aggregation practices. As noted in a recent FAO

publication:

“the Tropical Landscapes Summit in April 2015, the investment bank ADM Capital announced

a US$1 billion bond programme to provide needed finance for forest conservation and

development. The Rainforest Impact Bond would support a finance mechanism to protect

30 http://www.forestlandscaperestoration.org/media/iucn-netherlands-green-finance-academy 31 Sewell, A., Bouma, J., and van der Esch, S (2016). Investigating the challenges and opportunities for scaling

up Ecosystem Restoration, The Hague: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

http://www.bonnchallenge.org/videos/forest-landscape-restoration-guatemala

http://elti.yale.edu/sites/default/files/rsource_files/onlineaug2016_course_report_portuguesejan16_0.pdf

http://www.forestlandscaperestoration.org/media/iucn-netherlands-green-finance-academy

http://www.forestlandscaperestoration.org/media/iucn-netherlands-green-finance-academy

https://partnershipsforforests.com/

http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5031e.pdf



KNOWFOR Evaluation



forests, offering investors the means to help countries cut deforestation and reduce global

carbon emissions.”32

Learning From Scepticism Among the Partners

As with any large scale-systems change effort, scepticism will emerge. Several who were interviewed described

the early scepticism to the idea of FLR and how that seemed to subside with the commitments to the Bonn

Challenge. More recently, the scepticism has been about the delivery on the promise on FLR, which is central

to the challenge of unlocking finance. All who were interviewed confirmed the fact that more examples are

urgently needed to make the compelling business case to Ministers of Finance, private sector investors and

donors. ROAM and other tools provide a positive step forward in unlocking finance, several noted that IUCN as

well as others within the FLR community are still on a “steep a learning curve.” The following comments give

voice to some of the scepticism regarding unlocking finance for FLR:

“We still don't get the buy-in from the Ministry of Finance. We convince the Ministry of Forests or

convince the Ministry of Environment but it's the Ministry of Finance that matters. We haven't

[reached] there yet because we don't have a good set of examples… we shouldn't be looking for them

to solve our problems. We should be solving theirs, and that's the way you get money for business… at

the moment it's actually quite clear in most countries that [subsidies are] driving deforestation,

because we subsidise that process. We make things easier for businesses that want to do that, but for

businesses that don't want to go down that route, we need to address that policy. If we don't tackle

that, then we're actually only attacking half the problem… I'm not quite sure that KNOWFOR's

convincing enough for governments to say, ‘I have money. You're right, investing in depleted land is a

business. It actually makes sense for my government to spend money here rather than on education,

or on health, or on transport, or on 10 other things.’ That we haven't quite done yet.” (#18)

This episode study illustrates the multi-dimensional nature of policy shifts that are needed to effectively

unlocking finance for FLR. It also illustrates the that FLR implementation has really just begun and the

challenge of unlocking finance requires deep understanding multi-scale and inter-related systems, engaging

multiple stakeholders with vastly different perspectives and expectations, dealing with both short-term and

long-term time horizons, and embracing emergent and often unpredictable windows of opportunities that may,

or may not lead to desired outcomes. KNOWFOR was a major contributing factor for IUCN to contribute to

equipping decision makers with new knowledge on unlocking finance.

32 FAO & Global Mechanism of the UNCCD (2015). Sustainable financing for forest and landscape restoration:

Opportunities, challenges and the way forward. Discussion paper. Rome.

35

5. Results Chart and Annexes

A results chart for IUCN’s work in unlocking finance is presented below. It is based on the five questions that support Key Evaluation Question #1. In

column two, a summary is provided, which responds to each of the key evaluation questions, and where significant progress has been made. An

assessment of the strength of evidence is also included and based upon confirmation of a similar narrative by other IUCN staff and partners who are

familiar with the project. The episode study has been desktop based, supported by phone interviews from October 2016 through January 2017 and in-

person interviews with IUCN staff from the DC office in early January 2017. In conclusion, we believe the strength of evidence is sufficient for the

purposes of the episode study narrative.

Table 2. Integrating findings using a KNOWFOR programme results chart

Key Eval. Question Summary Response Evidence Evidence rating /

contribution

KE

Q 1

Did KNOWFOR contribute

to equipping decision

makers and

intermediaries? If so, what

lessons can be drawn from

KNOWFOR’s approach to

translating knowledge for

action?

Evidence reveals that IUCN has been equipping decision

makers and intermediaries at multiple scales to both secure

commitments to the Bonn Challenge but also to define critical

impact pathways to unlock finance (described throughout the

report). KNOWFOR’s approach provided IUCN with critical

flexibility that allowed them to respond to windows of political

opportunity and contribute to a number of diplomatic

successes and allowed IUCN to mobilise over $200 million to

continue the work of KNOWFOR and move towards

implementation of FLR (outlined in Table 2 below).

Detailed interviews with 14

key actors, review of 60+

documents (peer reviewed,

programme annual reports,

technical and grey literature),

correspondence and other

media.

Medium - Strong

Evidence strongly

confirms KNOWFOR

was essential for IUCN

to equip decision-

makers. Unlocking

finance requires a long

time horizon - too early

to define impact.

Qu

estio

n 1

.1

To what extent were the

programme outcomes

realised and were there

examples of KNOWFOR

activities contributing to

policy and practice change?

Even though there were no specific programme outcomes

linked to quantity of finance secured, evidence supports an

increasing number and type of resources mobilised by IUCN

with direct contribution from KNOWFOR (described throughout

the report). Securing GEF TRI was a major accomplishment

and contribution by KNOWFOR (as illustrated in section 5.3).

There is little evidence of programmes in place at the national,

subnational scale where finance is being actively unlocked for

FLR but Rwanda is one example where progress is being made

based on reform in policy and practice across the government

and in working with private financiers and public sector donors

(defined in section 5.2).

Primarily through analysis of

interviews with key

informants, analysis of IUCN

documents, and review of

available web-based material

on grants secured (such as

GEF TRI) and analysis of

programs in Rwanda etc.

Medium – Strong

Evidence confirms

KNOWFOR’s

contribution to securing

GEF TRI and starting to

learn what is needed to

better engage in policy

reform at the domestic

scale, engage with

potential private sector

FLR investors.

36

Qu

estio

n 1

.2

How and under what

conditions were decision

makers equipped by our

knowledge processes and

products?

While there were many different impact pathways to engage

with decision makers at the global and regional scales (white

papers, briefing notes, inviting key country leaders to regional

and global events etc.) the main impact pathway to equip

decision makers regarding FLR was done via processes such as

ROAM that were demand driven, stakeholder led, and

generated a set of technical products that helped to define the

implementation road map Described in section 5.1). What

happens after ROAM is still a major question being explored

and is highly context dependent. FLR Hubs are another critical

node of influence for unlocking finance (noted in section 5.5).


interviews with key


documents, and review of

products prepared by IUCN

and others to unlock FLR

finance.

Medium

Evidence confirms

KNOWFOR’s

contribution to

developing key

knowledge pathways,

modest validation with

partners and no

independent

verification.

Qu

estio

n 1

.3

What were the positive or

negative unexpected

outcomes from these

efforts?

Interviews reveal a wide range of unexpected outcomes from

the size and scope of the response to the Bonn Challenge

(addressed in section 5.4), the increasing demand for and

scalability of ROAM (addressed in section 5.1), the success in

securing GEF support for TRI (addressed in section 5.3), the

challenge for unlocking finance which requires massive

national policy harmonisation as well as international donor

support and private sector investment (example of Rwanda

provided in section 5.2), and other issues described in section

5.4 such as not solving the challenge of bankable flow and the

concerns being voiced that FLR implementation will be too

costly, difficult and time intensive (described throughout the

document).


interviews with key

informants.

Medium

This analysis is highly

subjective, based on

the response by

individuals close to the

issues and would

benefit from a wider

sample size for validity.

Qu

estio

n 1

.4

What promising practices

can be identified through

partner experience?

Examples of promising practices that are emerging through

work at IUCN to unlock FLR finance include the work of the FLR

Hubs, web-based tools such as the Bonn Challenge Barometer,

and increasing number of FLR forums and exchanges (each

described in section 5.5), ROAM as a promising practice

(described in section 5.1), and the many promising practices

being developed through TRI such as restoration finance

events, Enabling Investment Rapid Diagnostic Tool and holistic

approaches to unlocking finance, development of bankable

proposals, and interest in private sector funds with over 20

funds identified (presented in section 5.3).


interviews with key


documents and web searches.

Medium – Strong

The evidence is clear

that practices in place

further validation may

be needed to be sure

they are as “promising”

as has been described

by IUCN staff/partners.

37

Qu

estio

n 1

.5

What lessons have been

learned from the partner

experience?

Analysis of key lessons learned that are emerging through work

at IUCN to unlock FLR finance include the long term nature of

unlocking finance (addressed throughout the document), the

need to secure national mandate for implementation of FLR as

key enabler, importance of inclusive finance which features

financial instruments that are pro-poor, gender inclusive and

demonstrates respect for indigenous communities (exemplified

in section 5.2 with the Rwanda case), the value of ROAM and

what is needed to be done after ROAM (described in section

5.2), and how the fundamental nature of the FLR challenge has

changed, FLR being viewed as essential infrastructure, learning

from skepticism among partners (each defined in section 5.6).


interviews with key

informants.

Medium

This analysis is

somewhat subjective,

based on the response

by individuals close to

the issues and would

benefit from a wider

sample size for validity.

Annex 1: Timelines

RWANDA TIMELINE DETAIL

TIME EVENT 1975 Rwandan government begins major replanting campaign.

1975 Umuganda community-based forestry works programme launched.

1976 National Arbor Day launched.

1987- 1997 National Forests Action Plan.

1990-1995 Genocide - large-scale fatality, population displacement and ecological damage.

1991 National Endowment Strategy (SNER) launched.

1991 National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP) launched.

1993-1995 All forestry activities suspended due to conflict.

1995-1999 All forestry activities resume at ‘modest’ scale.

1995-2000 IUCN works with film maker John D Liu to document Loess Plateau restoration project in China with World Bank.

1998 National consultative process begins to define future goals of Rwanda.

2000 Rwanda Vision 2020 launched by President Kagame.

2004 National Forestry Policy.

2004 Positive trend in forest cover with total of 19.6% and trend of 1% per year for a decade.

2010-2011

Film maker John D Liu travels to Rwanda, makes film ‘Emerging in a Changing Climate’ for Climate Development Knowledge Network, suggests that GoR engage with IUCN and UN Forum on Forests to mobilise support for FLR.

2010 IUCN engage with GoR Ministers to gain support for FLR commitment through the UNFF.

2010 GoR, UNFF, IUCN (including GPFLR) sign an MoU setting out collaboration on FLR.

2010 GoR approach IUCN as secretariat of the UN Forum on Forests for support of FLR.

2010 Updating 2004 policy of the National Forestry Policy (2010) launched by Ministry of Forestry and Mines.

2011 Rwanda commits to restore 2M ha of forest and agricultural land at Global launch of Int’l Year of the Forests (2/2/2011).

38

2011 National Forestry Policy awarded “Future Policy Award by World Future Council.

2011 IUCN conduct Technical Workshop in Rwanda to discuss implications of FLR commitment by GoR.

2011 Ministry of Natural Resources and Department of Forestry and Nature Conservation in Rwanda Natural Resources Authority begin country-wide restoration opportunity assessment with IUCN and WRI.

2011-2014 Design of LAFREC commences.

2013 Rwanda establishes FONERWA to support financing for environmental projects.

2013 Rwanda sets target of 30% national forest cover in Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy 2013-2018 and Vision 2020.

2014 ROAM Validation Workshop (July).

2014 Forest Landscape Restoration Opportunity Assessment for Rwanda released (Sept).

2014 RNRA and IUCN generate stocktake of FLR projects.

2014-2019 LAFREC project implemented by World Bank.

2015 Rwanda ROAM Assessment launched by Minister of Natural Resources (June).

2015 MINAGRI and MINIRENA collaborate with FAO and IUCN on joint workshop to coordinate FLR and Sustainable Food & Agriculture programmes.

2015- 2018 BMU funded Piloting Multiple-Benefit Packages through FLR and REDD+ in Rwanda for scaling up in Africa project begins implementation by GoR and IUCN.

February 2015 Clear Horizon Consulting publishes Episode Study for IUCN entitled: Rwandan Forest Landscape Restoration Opportunity Assessment: Tracing the Influence.

13-16 July 2015

Sustainable Development Investment Partnership – 3rd International Conference on Financing for Development held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

21 March 2016 Rwanda’s Minister of Natural Resources inaugurates Africa Regional Hub for Forest Landscape Restoration in Kigali, Rwanda.

11 May 2016 World Economic Forum held in Rwanda – Announced dedicated FLR Hub.

July 2016 Africa High-Level Bonn Challenge Roundtable convened by GoR, East African Community and IUCN – Increases commitment to the Bonn Challenge.

11-12 Oct 2016

AFR 100 Regional Meeting held in Addis Ababa Ethiopia – 21 African nations pledge to restore 100 million ha by 2030.

31 Oct – 2 Nov 2016

First TRI Workshop held in Douala, Cameroon.

GEF TRI TIMELINE

TIME EVENT

From Mid 2014 Ongoing informal engagement by IUCN with GEF Secretariat staff.

21-22 March 2015 Bonn Challenge 2.0. High-level meeting in Bonn, Germany. Dr. Naoko Ishii delivered GEF remarks. Priority given to restoration. Finance working group proposed.

March–April 2015 Following Bonn 2.0, the GEF indicated they would be receptive to an IUCN proposal on FLR.

May 2015 IUCN receives confirmation of some countries who could be eligible to align with the program based on unallocated STAR.

May - July 2015 IUCN and partners develop and submit proposal to GEF

31 July 2015 Partners commit to GEF TRI proposal: Jean Ives Pirot, IUCN, Gustavo Merino, Director, Investment Centre Division, FAO Brennan Van Dyke, Director, GEF Coordination Office, UNEP.

05 August 2015 Proposal received by GEF.

39

November 2015 TRI two-page flyer produced by three partners: IUCN, UNEP, FAO.

December 2015 IUCN hosts informal panel on TRI during Paris UNFCCC COP with participation of GEF Secretariat, FAO and UNEP.

11 May 2016 Screening of the Project Identification Form by the Scientific and Advisory Panel, administered by UNEP, advises the GEF.

01 June 2016 TRI concept approved by GEF.

03 September 2016 Dr. Naoko Ishii launches TRI at IUCN World Conservation Congress.

31 Oct–2 Nov 2016 TRI Global Launch Workshop.

Annex 2: Persons Consulted and Interviewed

Name of person Position Institution

IUCN staff members

Stewart Maginnis Global Director, Nature based Solutions Group IUCN Gland, Switzerland

Carole Saint-Laurent Deputy Director Global Forest and Climate Change Programme IUCN (based in Toronto)

Patrick Wylie (Former) Senior Policy Adviser IUCN, Washington DC office, USA

Julien Colomer Monitoring and learning officer, Global Forest and Climate Change Programme IUCN Gland, Switzerland

Chetan Kumar Manager, Landscape Restoration Science and Knowledge IUCN, Washington DC office, USA

Miguel Calmon Senior Manager, Landscape Restoration Knowledge, Tools and Capacity IUCN, Washington DC office, USA

Mirjam Kuzee Forest Landscape Restoration Assessment Coordinator IUCN, Washington DC office, USA

Elmedina Krilasevic Programme Support Officer, Landscape Restoration IUCN, Washington DC office, USA

Joshua Schneck Programme Manager, Multilateral Environmental Funds Programmes & Projects IUCN, Washington DC office, USA

Rob Wild Technical Coordinator – People & Landscapes Programme IUCN, Eastern and Southern

Africa Office (ESARO)

Charles Karangwa Regional Forest Landscape Restoration Coordinator IUCN, Eastern and Southern

Africa Office (ESARO)

Resource persons involved in FLR work, but outside IUCN

Jacinto Coello Senior Programme Management/Liaison Officer (CGIAR/FAO), Biodiversity United Nations Environment

(UNEP)

Fraser Brown Principal Net Positive Solutions

Ian Munro Gray Senior Program Coordinator, Climate Investment Funds World Bank

40

Annex 3: Terms of Reference

Case study 3/3: Understanding IUCN’s role in unlocking public FLR finance

The KNOWFOR program (2012-2016) is being evaluated through a partner-led approach. These terms of reference are for the development

of an IUCN case study that will respond to the KNOWFOR key evaluation question 1:

Key evaluation question 1. Did KNOWFOR contribute to equipping decision makers and

intermediaries? If so, what lessons can be drawn from KNOWFOR’s approach to translating

knowledge for action?

To what extent were programme outcomes realised and were there examples of KNOWFOR

activities contributing to policy or practice change?

How and under what conditions were decision makers equipped by our knowledge

processes and products?

What were the positive or negative unexpected outcomes from these efforts?

What promising practices can be identified through partner experience?

What lessons have been learned from partner experience?

The KNOWFOR evaluation plan is an integral part of these terms of reference and is annexed33. It contains the KNOWFOR theory of change

as well as supplementary information to be used in developing the case study.

Description: Growing interest in FLR as a mechanism to help countries meet domestic and international climate change, biodiversity and

socio-economic objectives has led to the development of new domestic FLR-specific programs, policies and institutions, as well as to the

inclusion of FLR in existing domestic plans in many countries. Stimulating market demand for restoration products and increasing

structured investment mechanisms that target small and large investors to support FLR ambition in these countries is a complex challenge.

IUCN has stimulated increased public investment to address these FLR challenges, but IUCN’s impact pathways are poorly understood. This

case study will seek to explore IUCN’s contribution to unlocking public FLR finance via identification of main impact pathways, critical nodes

of influence, and knowledge flow, focusing on the GEF ‘The Restoration Initiative’ project. This case study uses the hypothesis “that IUCN

33 Annex 1: Overall DFID KNOWFOR evaluation plan

41

used its unique combination of linkage to members, knowledge brokering, technical analysis and convening attributes to play a critical role

in the development and growth of FLR”.

1. Methodology

This case study will use Performance Story Reporting - The Performance Story Reporting technique is a framework for reporting on

contribution to long-term outcomes using mixed methods. The process steps include clarifying the programme logic, developing guiding

questions for the social inquiry process and data trawl and integration using a results chart. Final conclusions about the extent to which an

intervention has contributed to outcomes are made collectively by programme teams and stakeholders based on an assessment of the

strength of the evidence.

Specifically this will mean developing or selecting a theory of change to test34, developing guiding questions that align with KNOWFOR key

evaluation question 135, collecting evidence from document review and key informant interviews, mapping evidence against a results

chart36, and writing an evidence-based narrative to describe the findings (the case study report)37. Virtual meetings with the project team

and key stakeholders are needed.

Detailed guidance on the implementation of the case study, including assumptions, critical questions to be included, and adherence to the

overall KNOWFOR evaluation plan is available and will be provided through the IUCN Global Forest and Climate Change Monitoring and

Learning Officer, Jules Colomer ([email protected]).

2. Deliverables

The consultant will deliver a 20-page report, using available secondary information (project reports, related web-based information) and

primary data (at least 5 key informant interviews) to provide an evidence-based narrative against the key evaluation question 1. Visual aids

such as timelines will be used as appropriate to clearly convey key messages.

34 Annex 2: IUCN Forest Landscape Restoration theory of change 35 Annex 3: Example guiding Questions 36 Annex 4: IUCN results chart 37 Annex 5: Case study report sections

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