International Funding for Amazon Conservation and Sustainable Management

Recommendations

Based on the methodology, results, and the urgency to maximize investments’ impact, this analysis puts forward four central recommendations. The recommendations are oriented toward the donor community active in the Amazon region and aim to enhance dialogue and collaboration among the various types of funders, increase access to funding, streamline the data tracking work, and increase the evidence behind funders’ various strategies and approaches toward conservation. They fall into two categories: (I) analytical and technical, and (II) strategic.

ANALYTICAL AND TECHNICAL

Continue to track international funding for conservation and sustainable management in the Amazon: Significant time and effort was required for this study’s data collection and the previous one. Timely collaboration from the donors to provide data and respond to inquiries if needed, is an essential piece to ensure prompt results. Updating the data should be done regularly, at least once every two years, and ideally every year to provide ongoing tracking information and input for donors’ strategic planning. This will result in transparency and data exchange. Creating interoperability between the different grant databases used by donors would streamline data collection. In addition, partnerships between donor organizations to track and facilitate this data collection, such as within donor working groups (including those gathered per country or type of donor like the Funders of the Amazon Basin (FAB), comprised of private foundations), would ease the survey and response burden, and ensure more timely results.

Furthermore, the conservation strategies should be reviewed and adjusted for future studies. For example, many projects in this study were focused on bioeconomy, but since there is currently no category for bioeconomy, many donors tagged these projects to Other. Before embarking on the subsequent international funding analysis for the Amazon, a meeting with donors should be held to review and if needed, update these strategies. Finally, given the changing landscape of funders, and the growing influence of intermediary organizations as re-grantors, it is worth revisiting the categories of types of donors to be used in future studies.

A new study, for which ASL funding is available, could update the strategies to be used and include development funding attributed to other sectors that indirectly affects work in the conservation and sustainable management sphere, such as human rights work focused on Indigenous Peoples and combatting crime and illegality, among others. The study could also incorporate reimbursable financing and the private sector, instead of strictly grants, as well as investments made by country governments (including in-kind and annual capital, operations, and maintenance budgets) to give a greater picture of all the funding available for the Amazon. Finally, a new study could use georeferenced data – to the extent such data is provided by donors – to provide more granular-level information on projects’ geographic location and area of influence.

Measure the impacts / outcomes of investments: International grant financing for the Amazon is limited, and there is a need for better data and metrics to best assess which conservation strategies and activities have the highest return on their investment. This study does not attempt to measure the impact of investments; however, that is a need. There should be efforts by individual donors to collect additional data that is grant-specific to ensure projects are designed to allow for impact assessment on the ground or to have common metrics to compare outcomes. In addition, measuring the unintended consequences – price effects, governance effects, and marginalization effects to name a few - of conservation funding could facilitate decision making to ensure that resources go where they are needed the most, and are being delivered in ways that are effective, efficient, and impactful. The needs in the Amazon are great, and there is urgency to act now, which requires structured and rigorous evaluations of conservation and sustainable management strategies to inform donors on how best to invest their money; and recipients on how to direct/re-direct their interventions and submit proposals. This kind of information is not readily available, is outdated, conducted for a few cases, or in many cases, not tracked or disseminated. Having individual donors track this information and compiling it in a single platform would provide a valuable resource.

Source: Walter Wust (SERNANP)

STRATEGIC

Enhance donor engagement and dialogue: Studies like this one highlight the importance of delivering joint analyses and having discussions on themes of common interest. Existing donor working groups provide a space to do so. As such, the ASL- facilitated donor working group can continue to bring together international donors in periodic virtual/in-person meetings to increase communication and collaboration. This is the only donor working group that includes bilateral agencies, multilateral agencies, and private foundations working in the Amazon region. It is important to reach out to new funders as they emerge and include them. Deeper engagement with this working group could be structured along thematic discussions according to specific areas of interest, geographies, or funding categories, for instance:

This engagement could be structured along thematic discussions according to specific areas of interest or funding categories. Key topics that donors prioritized during this study include:

Cooperation for transboundary watersheds like Putumayo-Içá River basin
Financing towards Indigenous Peoples
Collaboration towards supporting the ACTO and implementation of the Belem Declaration

Share best practices that could lead to improvements in access to funding: The study shows that few resources go directly to Indigenous entities despite the significant international attention calling on funders to do so, therefore it is important to simplify the international funding landscape to make it more accessible, especially to IPLCs. Different donors require multiple applications with different formats, timelines, and requirements, which excludes groups – often those in the most need - from applying for funding. Funders could simplify and streamline the process, without compromising social and environmental safeguards and financial management compliance, to apply for awards thereby increasing the opportunities to channel funding directly to IPLCs. In addition, the global donor community could establish mechanisms to effectively allow active participation and decision-making by IPLCs on resource allocation and use.

Conclusion

This study builds on previous work on non-reimbursable financing in the Amazon and provides valuable new insights into funding for Amazon conservation. The analysis shows steady increases in support from 2013 to 2019, and a subsequent decrease in funding annually during the COVID-19 period from 2020 to 2022. This could be due in part to the freezing of the Amazon Fund since 2019, at which time the large donations from Norway and Germany halted. Average donations are greater than in an earlier study period. From 2013 to 2015 donations averaged US$435 million per year, and in this round from 2020 to 2022 donations averaged US$629 million per year. However, when considering the greater number of donor participants in this study, rising inflation, and the increasing urgency for action, distributions for conservation in the Amazon have not kept up at the needed pace, demonstrating a disconnect between the current state of giving and pledges and the financing needs and gaps.

Brazil, Peru, and Colombia continue to receive the largest proportion of funding, while Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela have received the lowest proportion. However, these proportions do not correspond to the percentage of the Amazon housed in each country with the most extreme case of Bolivia, which has the third largest percentage of the Amazon within its country borders and receives 5 percent of total funding for the region. Conversely, Ecuador receives 7 percent and contains the smallest amount of the region at 1.6 percent. These numbers demonstrate a geographic mismatch in funding.

Bilateral institutions represent the largest category of donors, but their funding proportions have decreased. Private foundations have substantially increased their grant distributions for conservation in the Amazon in recent years, much of this due to the arrival of the Bezos Earth Fund, which contributed significant resources. As this study shows, national governments and international NGOs play an important role in promoting and ensuring conservation and sustainable management of the region and together receive half of the overall funding. Bilateral and multilateral agencies direct most of their funding to national governments, while private foundations target NGOs to receive their funding. This increased funding to international NGOs has transformed many of them into re-grantors, changing the process of grantmaking by having resources pass through multiple organizations before landing on the ground.

Nearly half of this support from international donors is directed toward four primary strategies: REDD+ program and policies, the creation and management of protected areas, Indigenous Peoples and lands, and integrated landscapes and land use planning. In the Amazon, Indigenous Territories represent roughly the same amount of land as protected areas. While funding for protected areas creation and management goes directly from original funding sources to government authorities in charge of these areas and NGOs, the same does not apply to funding for Indigenous Peoples and lands. Even with the large strategic focus on Indigenous Peoples and their lands, as a grant recipient Indigenous entities receive less than 1 percent of funding directly, another funding mismatch.

Countries in the Amazon are facing the need to conserve the Amazon’s forests and waters, while recovering hard-hit economies from the COVID-19 pandemic and providing for their populations – all with scarce resources. The pandemic put a severe strain on public budgets, and in tandem the amount of resources distributed for the Amazon’s conservation during this arduous period was reduced as shown by the study. This report provides an important baseline on non-reimbursable investments for conservation across the region, which donors, national governments, and others working in the Amazon can use during discussions on national-level and basin-wide targets and commitments.

Integrated conservation and sustainable development will require strategic collaboration and innovation now more than ever to meet the social, economic, and environmental needs of the region and promote its green, resilient, and inclusive recovery. These studies and the online dashboard allow donors to easily view funding trends and priorities within each of the countries, types of recipients, and conservation strategies. They represent a starting point for donors to work together, but the real effort falls to the donors to pool resources and design country level and regional strategies that reflect the needs of countries and recipients, while also promoting synergies that advance conservation efforts and working to strengthen a more sustainable future for the Amazon and those whose lives depend on it.