NatureWise NbS Incubator

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Naturewise: NbS Incubator for Climate Adaptation

Scaling up finance for Nature-based Solutions in Europe

Nowhere is immune to the worsening impacts of the climate crisis. Just take Europe: the world's fastest warming continent has suffered a series of extreme floods and droughts in recent years, wrecking lives and livelihoods and causing vast economic damage. There is an urgent need to scale up investment in transformational Nature-based Solutions (NbS) to strengthen climate adaptation and build more resilient societies and economies. Which is why WWF is developing NatureWise.

Investing in NbS in Europe is far too slow

Large scale Nature-based Solutions are central to enhancing climate adaptation and simultaneously boosting biodiversity, but they face significant obstacles, including a lack of awareness of their benefits among decision makers and investors, and pressure to stick to 20th Century 'solutions' based on trying to control nature with hard infrastructure. And, critically, a significant gap in financing for early-stage project development to create a pipeline of viable projects that are ready for investment.

NatureWise will generate a pipeline of NbS

WWF will create NatureWise - an Incubation Facility for NbS for climate adaptation in Europe, with the prime purpose of developing NbS propositions and providing guidance to mature the projects and assist with mobilizing public and private funding. Led by WWF’s Living European Rivers initiative in collaboration with WWF-Netherlands, this incubation facility will help bridge the current gap on early-stage development of NbS - something that no one is focusing - and so develop a pipeline of viable NbS for investment.

WWF and EIB partnership

Central to this will be WWF’s new four-year partnership with the European Investment Bank (EIB) to collaborate in mainstreaming NbS, which was signed during the Convention on Biological Diversity COP16 in Colombia. Under the agreement, the EIB will provide guidance on mobilizing public and private funding for the projects designed at NatureWise - ecosystem restoration projects linked to sectors such as agriculture, energy, and urban resilience. This facility will not just be a WWF facility. It will be open to other organizations to originate projects as well because we can only deliver effective large scale change by working together.

This partnership will create a pipeline of projects that enhance the power of nature to help Europeans adapt to climate impacts.

- WWF Director General, Kirsten Schuijt

Ambitious goals for NbS

The aim is to get the facility up-and-running within a year because the climate and nature crises can't wait. And because there is an unprecedented opportunity. The EU Nature Restoration Law came into force in 2024 obliging Member States to restore 20 per cent of the continent's land and waters by 2030, while the new European Commission committed to launching a European Climate Adaptation Plan and a European Water Resilience Strategy. By 2030, the aim is to create a pipeline of 10 large scale NbS programmes under NatureWise to accelerate climate adaptation and reverse nature loss in Europe - mobilising €0.5 billion in new green investments.