Michelin, the tire manufacturer, is the world’s largest buyer of natural rubber. It was also the first tire maker to commit to responsible rubber sourcing. Together with the nature conservation organization World Wildlife Fund, the company has committed to achieving wildlife-friendly rubber in Asian forests that were previously cleared for rubber trees, and displaced tigers, orangutans, and elephants in the process. One example of the collaboration between Michelin and WWF is a project called Thirty Hills, on the east coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, an island that has become a deforestation hotspot.

“These are not one-off projects,” said Paul Chatterton, founder and lead of WWF’s Landscape Finance Lab, at a meeting Devex joined in June where stakeholders gathered to learn more about this incubator for blended finance landscape regeneration projects. “This potentially can be a system where the whole world can be managed in a much more sophisticated and integrated way to protect biodiversity and benefit human beings.”

Recently, WWF and partners including Clarmondial, an investment advisory company focused on environmental businesses, and the Global Environment Facility, an international partnership to tackle environmental problems, launched Capitalising Conservation. The report explores how to mobilize private investment in conservation, providing conservation organizations and their partners with a framework for how to identify, structure, and execute investments.

Read the full article about financing conservation by Catherine Cheney at Devex International Development.