Carolin Planitzer serves aslandscape finance director for WWF’s Nature-Based Solutions Origination Platform (NbS-OP), a novel initiative aiming to originate, structure, resource, and implement landscape-scale NbS interventions that demonstrate and set the bar for high-integrity nature, human wellbeing, and climate impacts. In this capacity, she leads cross-organizational collaborations to develop landscape strategies and interventions in priority places. In addition, she oversees the platform’s landscape financial planning and structuring of innovative financing mechanisms.
Previously, Carolin served as WWF’s director of conservation finance. Her role involved leading conservation and financial planning and related negotiations with governments, local stakeholders, and private and public funders to develop large-scale public-private conservation and sustainable landscape initiatives. These included three Project Finance for Permanence (PFP) initiatives: Bhutan for Life, Peru’s Natural Legacy, and Herencia Colombia. Together these initiatives generated a total of US$463 million in public and private funding commitments for conservation and sustainable development goals.
For these and other WWF programs, Carolin oversaw feasibility analyses and the development of economic and political rationale. She also managed the negotiation and implementation of long-term public financing mechanisms for climate and conservation initiatives (including payments for ecosystem services, compensation payments, national royalties, green taxes, etc.). In addition, Carolin has extensive experience collaborating with multilateral donors such as the Global Environment Facility (GEF) and Green Climate Fund as she provided technical backstopping during the implementation of several GEF projects.
Before joining WWF, Carolin lived in Ecuador, where sheworked as an environmental economics and conservation finance specialist. Her responsibilities entailed advising the Government of Ecuador, Inter-American Development Bank, United Nations Development Programme, German development agency GIZ, and other organizations, including WWF. Before that, she was part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Green Economy program in South America and supported the Convention on Biological Diversity’s resource mobilization strategy.
Carolin holds an M.Sc. in environmental sciences cum laude from Wageningen University & Research in the Netherlands, with a focus on environmental systems analysis and resources economics. She earned a B.A. in international business and cultures from the University of Passau in Germany.
