[Workshop] Blended Teams, Blended Finance: Mixing it up for biodiversity impact
Tue, 16 Jun, 16:30–18:00|Room Sanada 1
Tue, 16:30
Biodiversity loss poses material risks to economies and financial systems, yet private capital toward nature-positive outcomes remains scarce. Blended finance is gaining traction as mechanisms to close this gap, but barriers persist: unclear risk-return profiles, absent measurement standards, and stubborn myths about investability and perceived risks.
The session tackles these head-on. We open by grounding the conversation in academic framing and lived audience experience, before moving into real-world cases from WWF where public, philanthropic, and institutional capital are combined to finance sustainable agriculture/ forestry, and blue economy initiatives. Participants then interrogate these cases directly, probing deal structures, aggregation logic, fiduciary alignment, and what it would take to replicate them at scale, especially from the perspective of large capital providers such as institutional investors and pension funds.
Small group discussions allow deeper exchange across practitioners, NGOs, academics, and investors, before a collective plenary surfaces shared barriers and solution pathways to scale-up private markets. A cross-cutting thread throughout: how blended finance can embed justice, stewardship, and multi-actor collaboration as design principles and not just an afterthought.
The session builds on initiatives including the Financing Biodiversity Project in the Netherlands and WWF Netherlands' blended finance work.
Schedule:
Intro & Academic Overview
The session opens with a quick agenda and room mapping, followed by a short academic framing of blended finance for nature and an interactive true-or-false exercise on common myths.
Blended Finance in Practice
A presentation of WWF that covers how to structure blended finance for nature-positive outcomes and the role of NGOs and institutional investors, illustrated by two real cases.
Introducing Challenges / Questions on the Cases
Participants are introduced to a set of guiding questions on deal structure, investability, and what institutional investors would need to engag, framing the group discussion to follow.
Group Discussions
Small groups work through both cases using the guiding questions, exploring barriers and enablers for institutional investment in blended finance for nature (discussion facilitated with questions by organizers).
Plenary & Close
Groups report back, findings are compared across tables, and the session closes with a short synthesis.