Nature-based Solutions (NbS) are essential to achieving international climate goals while delivering benefits for ecosystems and communities. However, mobilizing finance for NbS remains a significant challenge due to gaps in early-stage project development, investment-readiness, and financing mechanisms.

This session will take participants on a journey from project origination to innovative financing. It will focus on the practical steps required to develop and fund NbS projects—starting with pre-feasibility assessments and moving toward blended and catalytic finance. Real-world case studies from diverse geographies will illustrate challenges and breakthroughs.

Designed as a fishbowl discussion, the session encourages active participation from the audience, who will have the opportunity to rotate into the panel and share insights, questions, and experiences. The conversation will be moderated by Juraj Jurik, Director of Infrastructure and Nature at Global Infrastructure Basel (GIB) Foundation and will bring together perspectives from project developers, investors, the private sector, and philanthropy.

Objectives:
– Illustrate the full NbS investment journey from early concept to finance.
– Identify enabling conditions and partnerships needed to make NbS investable.
– Showcase innovative finance instruments and blended finance approaches.
– Foster peer learning through interactive discussion.
– Generate actionable insights and next-step collaboration opportunities.

Join us as we explore how investors can support nature, through translating global ambition into portfolio approaches. Connect with Aviva Investors and the Zoological Society of London as they share innovative tools and solutions to identify, manage, and engage on nature-related risks and opportunities. Collaborate with us to exchange ideas, build solutions, and drive action needed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss to put nature on a path to recovery for the benefit of people and planet.

Robust sustainability data is essential to steer capital toward real impact, but data inconsistencies, gaps, and greenwashing risks remain widespread. This workshop explores how AI-powered verification and collaborative tools can help financial actors reduce ESG data risk, comply with evolving regulations, and confidently allocate capital aligned with sustainability goals.

This interactive session explores innovative financial solutions to enhance smallholder farmers’ access to finance and climate resilience for cocoa and coffee, aiming to drive sustainability and secure supply. In a fishbowl format, participants will examine the roles of key stakeholders – including traders, investors, multinationals, cooperatives, local companies, and NGOs – in supporting smallholders. The session will highlight country case studies and the impact of multi-stakeholder platforms.

Despite the growth of impact investing over the past years, its expansion is impeded by its limited liquidity. Long holding periods, the lack of secondary markets, and foreign currency risks constrain the flow of impact capital, especially into emerging markets. To catalyze sustained capital flows into emerging and developing economies (EMDEs), there is a clear need for innovative financial structures and liquidity-enhancing mechanisms that can ease capital constraints and create more flexible exit pathways for impact investors. By creating more dynamic exit pathways and addressing market inefficiencies, such innovations can expand the pool of investors willing to allocate to impact, improve capital recycling, and accelerate the deployment of resources to regions where they are most needed.

How can Risk Mitigation Mechanisms unlock private capital for nature and climate solutions in developing countries? This interactive World Café will bring together experts to brainstorm on various de-risking tools, with a focus on blended finance structures such as guarantees (for energy, nature & agriculture, and impact investment), grants, first loss equity and technical assistance, as well as derivatives and innovative insurance products. The event aims to exchange ideas on these mechanisms and how they can be deployed, discover key examples, and gather insights from various professionals on challenges, how to address them, lessons learned and best practices.

How can catalytic capital drive systemic change in emerging markets? How can we demystify this process for those on the journey? This interactive session explores how impact funders, now more than ever, are deploying the capital continuum and using innovative and blended finance to unlock scalable solutions. We will explore new partnerships and models for sustainable impact, showcasing the power of collaboration in advancing the SDGs. Join us—and let’s put capital to work!

The workshop will explore ways in which financial institutions can promote impact in public markets. Examples include engagement, investment strategies, asset classes, product disclosure and impact measurement. The workshop aims to equip stakeholders with the key concepts and approaches to promote impact in their own specific context. To this end, three keynote presentations will offer insights from a regulatory, an academic and a practitioner perspective. The main part of the event will consist of interactive table discussions on different impact channels and aspects of impact in public markets. These discussions will be led by experts from banks, asset managers, academia, NGOs, consultancies and government. This will give participants a detailed insight into a specific impact channel and allow them to derive actionable measures. Participants will also gain a comprehensive overview of impact investing in public markets.

Financial regulators across Europe are increasingly requiring financial institutions to assess and manage climate and nature- related risks and the related impacts on traditional financial risks. A key step to effective risk management is conducting materiality assessments; but challenges with robust methodologies often hinder this process, and lead to underestimating these risks. In Switzerland, the Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) has set supervisory expectations on nature-related financial risks, becoming fully enforceable by 2028. This gives financial institutions time to ensure compliance, increase their understanding of nature-related financial risk and strengthen their risk management practices.

Natural ecosystems provide critical services to enable the economy and wider society, and especially key in advancing both climate mitigation and adaptation solutions. Investing in nature to secure such services requires innovative deployment of well-understood PPP approaches to infrastructure investment. AIIB, with the Paulson Institute, Morphosis and other MDBs are advancing proposals on scaling appropriate PPP arrangements to COP 30 in Belem. This event explores how such financial and associated policy innovations can unlock nature-related opportunities for private investors, and scale private capital flows into nature as infrastructure.