The Nature Hub CWNYC 2025 events

As companies race to meet climate and biodiversity goals, satellite technology is becoming essential for identifying risks and opportunities, targeting interventions, and tracking progress across supply chains and landscapes. This session will explore how companies, NGOs, and tech partners are using consistent, coherent geospatial data to address emissions from deforestation and biodiversity loss in tandem. Speakers will share real-world examples of how aligned data enables smarter decision-making, greater accountability, and measurable impact across nature and climate strategies.

Finance is one of the strongest levers we have to shift outcomes for climate, nature, and people. The goal is not just to mobilize more finance, but to mobilize finance that strengthens ecosystems, empowers communities, restores resilience, and creates long-term value.

Ending deforestation by 2030, transitioning food systems, strengthening supply chains, and building green economies are all financial challenges and opportunities. Private capital can be redirected toward outcomes that protect and regenerate nature, but this also requires governments to provide clear policy signals, de-risking tools, and regulatory certainty.

This session is focused on the latest developments that relate to investments into nature-based solutions and, more broadly, into the bioeconomy – the economic model that integrates biological resources into value chains for sustainable development. The aim is to showcase different investment types and different solutions categories from all regions of the world, particularly focusing on Latin America, Asia and Africa – and to encourage connections between investors and projects.

As coastal communities worldwide face escalating impacts from climate change, this high-level panel will showcase innovative approaches to scaling coastal nature-based solutions that deliver critical natural infrastructure benefits for adaptation. Building on momentum from discussions at the UN Ocean Conference and UNFCCC Ocean and Climate Change Dialogue this June, speakers will highlight pathways for enhanced ocean-climate action at COP 30 and in national climate plans. Using NYCW as a springboard to now take this momentum forward to Belem with the goal of securing investment for a coastal adaptation project in Brazil to be announced at COP30.

Amid weakening regulatory measures to safeguard our natural environments around the world, industry-led action by the private sector is becoming more important than ever. Informed by a growing body of research, tools, and data, with the aid of disclosure frameworks such as the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures’ recommendations, financial institutions, and companies are stepping up in big numbers to address nature-related impacts, dependencies, risks, and opportunities across their operations, supply chains, and portfolios.

The momentum in the private sector is moving the needle toward halting and reversing biodiversity loss, building climate resiliency, and ensuring sustainable water supplies for people and industry around the world. This interactive panel discussion will share emerging trends to transform the global economy to protect and restore nature and ecosystems, including insights from the largest investor-led engagement initiatives working toward this goal.

In the race to net zero, the greatest risk is inaction—not that nature-based carbon may one day be lost, but that we fail to deploy this solution set while it still offers gigaton-scale climate benefits. Misguided framings of natural climate solutions as “too risky” or “not permanent” are distorting policy and investment decisions, sidelining immediate and scalable climate action.

This session will be divided into two sections:

Section 1: The Science Case

Leading scientists will present scientific insights that challenge outdated narratives about permanence and risk. This section will demonstrate how nature-based solutions, when properly managed, can deliver durable climate benefits over meaningful timescales, while highlighting how the biggest risk by far is inaction. 

Speakers: Bronson Griscom (Conservation International), Susan Cook-Patton (The Nature Conservancy)

Section 2: Risk Management in Practice

This section will highlight initiatives that are actively developing and implementing practical solutions to better manage and mitigate reversal risk, highlighting both existing tools as well as new ideas. Speakers will share examples of how tools such as buffer pools, issuance-based monitoring, permanence funds, and insurance are and can be applied in real-world settings, in a system that is continually improving. 

Speakers: Nate Truitt (American Forest Foundation), Mikela Waldman (ICVCM) and Rick Saines (Arden Climate) 

By spotlighting both the scientific foundation and the operational tools available, the session will show how reframing the debate can help unlock the full potential of nature-based solutions.

Format:

Moderated panel discussion with two segments (science + solutions), followed by audience Q&A. 

The ocean is rising—in more ways than one. As the planet’s largest carbon sink, economic engine, and source of life, the ocean—when healthy—can provide myriad solutions to the climate and nature challenges facing society. Yet, marine species abundance has declined by over one-third over the past half century, and 11 million metric tons of plastic waste enter our waters each year. How do we balance the needs of people and the planet and restore the health of the marine world that is vital to a peaceful and prosperous future for us all? This high-level panel will bring together corporate leaders to explore how responsible business practices can drive the blue economy forward and unlock new opportunities while addressing the dual challenge of climate change and nature loss. We’ll examine industry responses to mounting ocean challenges from climate change, plastic pollution, and biodiversity loss, spotlighting advances in Nature-Positive Ocean Pathways that allow companies to invest in and drive positive impact for both nature and people. Speakers will discuss how businesses are developing credible strategies to contribute to ocean protection and regeneration, how finance can accelerate this transformation, and what new forms of collaboration across sectors, borders, and communities are needed to unlock the ocean’s full potential.

This session explores how FSC provides a trusted framework for corporate climate and nature strategies, one that connects the forest floor to the sales floor. In an era of rising regulatory, investor, and consumer expectations, companies need solutions that are not only environmentally and socially responsible but also deliver economic value. Forest Stewardship Council certification can help companies strengthen supply chain resilience, reduce risk, build brand trust and loyalty, and unlock compelling storytelling and employee engagement opportunities.

This interactive dialogue will explore practical solutions, hear real-world stories, and help shape a shared vision of forests as critical infrastructure for a climate-resilient, nature-positive future. Together, we’ll how elevating the business case for FSC, and for forest investment more broadly, can drive systemic change and lasting impact.

To meet the needs of a rapidly growing population, we have prioritized food production over planetary health. Food production has the largest impact on nature and the planet of any human activity, driving habitat conversion, biodiversity loss, water take and pollution, soil degradation, overfishing, and climate change. Voluntary environmental standards reward the better performers rather than rein in those that cause the biggest impacts. We need to reduce the impact of the worst performers to make food production more sustainable and resilient.

Codex Planetarius is a proposed system of minimum environmental performance standards to make globally traded food more sustainable and resilient. The 1% Fund is an associated initiative that also uses market mechanisms to generate the finance needed to reduce key environmental factors that are not included in prices. A 1% environmental levy would be collected on top of the declared price of globally exported food commodities. The funds would be invested to make food production legal as well as more resilient in the face of climate change, ensuring that food exports maintain or improve the natural resource base of exporting countries for present and future generations.

The intended outcome of the convening is to socialize Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund among a greater audience of government officials, companies, and NGOs, and to generate support and involvement in pilot projects, with the ultimate goal of introducing both initiatives through bilateral, multilateral, and then WTO trade agreements. A similar program, Codex Alimentarius, was established by 18 countries in 1963 as a set of minimum mandatory health and safety standards for global food. When Codex Alimentarius was embraced by the WTO as the global health and safety standard for globally traded food, more than 160 additional countries adopted it.

The goal of Codex Planetarius is to help countries measure and manage the key environmental impacts of food production, to ensure that global food trade maintains or improves food production rather than mining nature and the resource base of exporting countries. Governments need to approve Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund, but identifying the right place to pilot the programs is the current goal.

At the end of the current phase of work, WWF will work with a wide range of institutions to determine if and how Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund should be pursued and which international organizations should be involved. Since both programs are government-to-government strategies, governments and international organizations will take the work forward, not an NGO. If it moves forward, there will be efforts to analyze the impacts of Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund and how to address them. One way to move both concepts forward is for individual countries to use their own data to analyze the impacts and then pilot and test them within bilateral trade agreements. It will take time to create and analyze the results. But the willingness of countries to endorse Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund will be key for others to engage over time. It could take a decade to build support, unless there is a global food crisis or disruption and Codex Planetarius and the 1% Fund are fast-tracked as ways to address them and make the global food system more resilient for nature.

Less than 1% of international climate aid reaches Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, despite their deep connection to forests and essential role in sustaining biodiversity and climate stability. This session explores what it takes to shift that reality through direct-access funding mechanisms and community-based and Indigenous-led governance initiatives.

Drawing on experiences from Peru, Brazil, Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the session will highlight how Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities are designing and testing funding models that reflect local priorities, strengthen territorial governance and deliver tangible outcomes. Speakers will share what is working, what remains challenging, and what lessons have emerged along the way.

The discussion will also include recent developments in national policy and practice, from new legislation in Peru and Brazil, to policy shifts in Colombia and local initiatives in the DRC, and examine the role of data in forest monitoring and territorial protection. How can data help identify threats, inform advocacy, guide investments and respond to deforestation before it escalates?

The session will also consider what these efforts mean for the global forest and climate agenda. As the world moves toward key discussions at COP30, it will explore how initiatives such as the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, the Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership’s tenure commitment, and the donor pledge on Indigenous tenure and guardianship can align with and help scale what is already being led by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.

With shrinking civic space and increasing risks on the ground, the case for direct, long-term and flexible funding has never been stronger.

While carbon market actors are reaching a consensus on core criteria for high integrity forest carbon credits, many challenges remain for projects and programs as implementation ramps up. One immediate challenge is in the alignment and coordination of data in allocating jurisdictional baselines in Verra’s VM0048 methodology and ART TREES, the jurisdictional REDD+ standard, which has major implications for the viability of project investment and distribution of carbon revenues. This event will provide an opportunity for the establishing of best practice in how data is presented, coordinated and used in the development of nested jurisdictional crediting systems. We will advance the state-of-the art by spotlighting the experiences of projects, jurisdictions and other actors holding possibly competing priorities while also working to achieve alignment. We also include perspectives of ratings companies and/or global bodies like ICVCM on the implications for credit integrity during the transition to nested programs.

To explore how different forest finance tools—REDD+, restoration, and new mechanisms like HIFOR and TFFF—can work together to form a high-impact, diversified portfolio that mitigates climate risk, delivers measurable returns, and sustains the planet’s most critical natural infrastructure. The session will highlight real-world examples and emerging instruments that move beyond carbon to value forests for water, biodiversity, and stability in supply chains.

Papua, Indonesia, is home to more than 12 million hectares of intact rainforest, a globally significant ecosystem that sustains the identities, livelihoods, and rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, while playing a vital role in regulating the planet’s climate. In the face of increasing pressure from extractive industries, shifting land governance, and large-scale development programs, Papuan youth are stepping forward to lead efforts to protect their forests and shape a just and sustainable future rooted in local values and knowledge.

This session will highlight approaches to environmental and community resilience rooted in Papuan ways of life and their deep relationship with the land, often referred to as their mother. These include community-led conservation in the 1.7 million hectare Mamberamo Foja National Park, continued advocacy for Indigenous land rights, and the landmark recognition of Papua’s first Customary Forest, or Hutan Adat.

At the centre of these efforts are youth-led initiatives that connect agroecology, local food systems, eco-enterprise, and participatory governance in ways that sustain both forests and community well-being. Speakers from Indigenous communities, civil society, and government will share lived experiences of mobilizing village development funds, strengthening customary stewardship, and advancing nature-based livelihoods grounded in self-determination.

The session will also explore how Indigenous knowledge, combined with accessible digital tools for village planning, is reinforcing local leadership and enabling communities to defend their rights and territories.

By recognizing and supporting Papuan youth as leaders in climate action, this session invites governments, funders, and allies to work in solidarity with community-driven efforts that protect Papua’s forests and secure their future for generations to come.