Nature-positive Climate Risk Transfer & Financing: A Systematic Review​

Nature-based Solutions (NBS) for climate resilience offer great opportunities to address the crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation in an integrated way. Innovative climate risk transfer and financing instruments have emerged to scale up financing for NBS. Nature-positive finance models play a key role in closing the adaptation and nature finance gaps. This systematic review structures the evidence on mechanisms emerging from academic literature and practice that combine ‘NBS for climate resilience’ and ‘risk transfer and financing mechanisms’ and their effectiveness and economic viability. The review follows the reporting guidelines of the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 statement. We identified 104 academic publications (based on a screening of over 2000 studies listed on Web of Science and Scopus) and 132 non-academic publications that mentioned a risk transfer or financing mechanism, a Nature-based Solution, and hazard regulation benefits of the intervention. One key contribution of the review is an inventory with over 70 examples of risk transfer and financing mechanisms that incentivize investments in NBS for climate resilience. In addition, the systematic review highlights knowledge gaps and needs for further research in this field, including the quantification of co-benefits, disaggregation of benefits by socio-economic characteristics, and consideration of equity / inequity in the distribution of risks and benefits.