Conservation Finance
Conservation Trust Funds
Sangha Tri-National Foundation
The Sangha Tri-national landscape encompasses three counties: Cameroon, the Central African Republic and the Republic of Congo. Although threatened by logging, it has some of the most pristine tropical forests left on the African continent today.
© R.Isotti, A.Cambone - Homo ambiens / WWF-Canon
WWF played an important role in founding the Sangha Tri-National Foundation (TNS Foundation), created in March 2007. The TNS Foundation is an independent conservation trust fund that will raise and channel millions of dollars for the protection and management of a trans-boundary forest complex called Sangha Tri-National covering a total surface area of some 28,000 km². The TNS Foundation has already received 11.5 million Euros in endowment commitments from both public and private sector donors. Endowment funding is currently secured from the German Development Bank, KfW (five million Euros), the French Development Agency, AfD (three million Euros), and the Regenwald Stiftung (about 3.5 million Euros) registered in Germany to support tropical forest conservation in Central Africa and capitalized through sales of Krombacher’s “rainforest beer.”
Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA) Trust Fund
The Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA) Trust Fund, managed by The Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (FUNBIO) was established in 2004 with an initial capitalization from WWF and the Global Environment Facility of $500,000 each. Today, about $40 million has been committed by WWF and its partners to finance a 10-year plan to create a network of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon one-and-a-half times larger than the entire US National Park system. Once fully funded, the Fund will be used to maintain continued protection of a 492,098km2 network of national parks and sustainable use reserves.
Mesoamerican Reef Fund
The Mesoamerican Reef (MAR) Fund is a regional financing mechanism founded in 2004 that includes four countries: Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and Guatemala. It was created to strengthen the alliance among the four country-specific trust funds. The MAR Fund is unique as the first environmental fund in the Western Hemisphere to transcend national boundaries and encompass an entire ecoregion. The Fund’s mission is to conserve and sustainably manage the resources and natural processes in the Mesoamerican reef region for present and future generations. It supports projects related to improving water quality, ecotourism, sustainable fisheries, and strengthening public institutions.
The scale and challenge to conserve Mexico’s natural resources requires reliable and permanent funding and collaboration with local communities and national NGO’s.
© Gustavo YBARRA / WWF-Canon
The Mexican Nature Conservation Fund
The Mexican Nature Conservation Fund was created in 1994. The Fund’s mission is to conserve Mexico’s biodiversity and encourage the sustainable use of natural resources. To date the Fund is the largest conservation trust fund in existence and has raised close to $100 million dollars towards its endowment. Major donations have come from USAID, the Mexican government, the Global Environment Facility, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. Its participatory strategy allows local communities and civil society groups to access grants, training, and other support to develop sustainable activities in and around the country's critical ecosystems.
The Bhutan Trust Fund for Environmental Conservation
In 1991, WWF created and established the world's first conservation trust fund in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. The Fund was initially financed through a $1 million investment from WWF, as well as investments from the Global Environment Facility, World Bank, the Royal Government of Bhutan, and the governments of Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, and Switzerland. The trust fund provides Bhutan with an autonomous financial mechanism through which to fund local conservation activities.
The trust fund's permanent endowment (approximately $33 million) generates at least $1.5 million annually to support training for local natural resource managers, surveying Bhutan’s forest resources, providing institutional support for community-based resource management, and supporting a variety of environmental education and outreach campaigns.
Many conservation trust funds are hybrids of what earlier studies considered to be distinct categories of conservation trust funds, serving as “umbrella funds” to manage separate fund accounts for different purposes, but under a single legal and institutional structure.
Different types of conservation trust funds include:
- Endowment, where the capital is invested in perpetuity, and the resulting investment income is used to finance grants and activities;
- Sinking fund, where the entire principal and investment income is disbursed over a fairly long period of time (typically ten to 20 years) until it is spent and finally “sinks” to zero;
- Revolving fund, where the revenue from taxes, fees, fines, or payments for environmental services regularly goes into the fund and is immediately used for specific purposes;
- Park fund, which finances the management costs (and sometimes also the establishment costs) of specific protected areas, or a country’s entire protected areas system.
- Grants fund, which finances various types of activities related to biodiversity conservation defined in the fund’s legal documents, and is not restricted to financing protected area management costs;
- Brown fund, which finances activities, such as pollution control and waste treatment. Many brown funds allocate five to ten percent of total grant funding for biodiversity conservation and protected areas. Most brown funds are financed by pollution charges or fines.
- Water Fund, which facilitates collection of water usage fees from down stream users and transfers these funds to upstream watershed or forest conservation.
Learn More:
Rapid Review of Conservation Trust Funds (2008) full report
English Executive Summary (2008)
French Executive Summary (2008)
Spanish Executive Summary (2008)
Conservation Trust Fund Investment Survey (2008)
Summary List of Conservation Trust Funds (2008)
Experience with Conservation Trust Funds (1999)
Conservation Finance Alliance
