Join the Emergent Forest Finance Accelerator Team

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Forests are crucial to all life on Earth. They capture and store carbon and are one of the most promising, large-scale, and cost-effective opportunities to combat climate change. Rainforests also sustain rainfalls, food supply, vital ecosystems, and livelihoods for over a billion people. Protecting them is not just a moral imperative, it is essential for a stable, prosperous, and sustainable future for us all. As the COVID-19 crisis highlights, we live in a fragile and interconnected world where sustainability cannot be taken for granted.

There is increasing recognition of the urgency of climate change. The Paris Agreement in 2015 committed governments to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels. 760 major corporations have committed to climate neutrality, and over 40 countries have implemented some form of carbon pricing scheme. After two decades of putting necessary, effective, high integrity standards and market mechanisms in place, The Emergent Forest Finance Accelerator (“Emergent”) has the historic opportunity to channel this momentum to solving the deforestation crisis.

Emergent helps safeguard the world’s tropical forests by building a global market for forest carbon credits. Countries generate these credits by reducing deforestation and tropical deforestation (called “REDD+”). For forest countries, Emergent provides a guaranteed source of demand by facilitating access to a range of high-volume buyers, backed by a purchase guarantee from donors, giving countries the certainty need-ed to make investments in forest protection and chart a new course. For buyers, Emergent provides access to the highest-quality REDD+ credits, enabling them to meet their climate neutrality goals. Emergent is currently grant-funded, but will become self-sufficient through transaction fees as volumes build.

In the case of corporate purchases of credits, Emergent contracts via a standard ERPA with corporate buyers on a forward, unit-contingent basis. Credits purchased from jurisdictions (also via ERPA) are sold to buyers, with the resulting revenues transferred, minus a small transaction fee, to jurisdictions via UN/World Bank-accredited ‘financial intermediaries’ (FIs). FIs will be contracted by Emergent to provide these transfer services, and to work with jurisdictions to report on the use of the funds for pre-agreed purposes.

In the case of price guarantee purchases, Emergent transfers funding from OECD governments to jurisdictions in return for credits which are then retired. (As well as providing a demand signal to jurisdictions, these transactions are effectively government-to-government ‘results-based payments’ for progress in reducing deforestation.) Before use, these funds may be held by Emergent or potentially in a trust fund arrangement administered by a multilateral such as the UN.