South Africa has numerous plant and animal species found nowhere else in the world, with biodiversity-abundant areas including the Cape Floral Kingdom, Succulent Karoo and Grasslands. These diverse natural assets form a critical part of South Africa’s ecological infrastructure – the natural foundations for water and food security, ecosystem health and economic well-being.
 
Healthy, functioning ‘‘sustainable landscapes’’ underpin human health and well-being, as well as sustainable and resilient economies. They can also contribute significantly to the Sustainable Development Goals: raising employment, safeguarding access to clean water, ensuring environmental sustainability and resilience to future environmental shocks, and increasing the amount of land and oceans under protection.
 
It is more cost-effective to maintain intact ecological infrastructure than it is to restore it. But many conservation-critical landscapes are facing considerable threats. Essential environmental issues require more attention and South Africa is confronted with a substantial shortfall in spending to address these serious challenges. To continue providing such benefits will require a coordinated shift in how priority landscapes are managed and how finance is raised for these efforts.

WWF and Wilderness Foundation Africa (WFA) formed the Sustainable Landscape Finance Coalition to drive the development of finance solutions for effective and enduring landscape conservation and environmental work across South Africa.

Through a 16-member council, strategic partners and the Innovation Hub, the coalition brings together a national knowledge base of thought leaders, experts and stakeholders in the finance sector. The coalition relies on strategic partners to ensure effective implementation in the coalition’s incubators and leans on a group of voluntary specialist contributors who provide expertise to support the work of the coalition. 

We work to develop a cohesive conservation finance network, redirect and create new financial flows, and capacitate higher impact and greater delivery of sustainable finance solutions for priority landscapes. We co-develop new finance strategies for key conservation areas, as well as add considerable momentum to initiatives already underway. 

Additionally, a few finance solution incubators have been initiated to identify and implement pilot initiatives. Some examples include a pilot project on biodiversity-related tax deductions and enabling property rebates for protected areas.

WWF and Wilderness Foundation Africa have been driving the coalition and the network of members now includes those in the agriculture, banking, investment, and legal sectors, as well as academia and government.

WWF and Wilderness Foundation Africa had joint objectives to investigate ways to build innovative financing models to support landscape conservation. Given the sustainable finance work done individually by WWF and WFA, both parties shared similar ideas and beliefs that there was a need for a new regional platform to coordinate landscape finance approaches in South Africa.

In 2019, they joined hands to launch the Sustainable Landscape Finance Coalition to address the urgent needs of attracting finance into South Africa and the region’s most crucial conservation-worthy landscapes.

1. The coalition has created six finance solution incubators. In reviewing some of these incubators, a high-level cost benefit analysis was conducted, and the initial findings show that investments of all the incubators combined would be between R243 million and R329 million in a conservative scenario, and between R1.4 billion and R1.9 billion in the least restrictive scenario. 

2. One of the innovative pilot projects – the Biodiversity Management Agreement Tax Investigation Incubator – has proven successful and shows the ability of an incubator to unlock feasible solutions for new financial innovations to be piloted.