New partnership emerges to drive large-scale investment in nature restoration in SEQ.
01 October 2024: South East Queensland has a new coalition of the willing – uniting government, private sector, industry, and community partners to drive much-needed new sources of finance into landscape-scale nature restoration in the region.
The new “ENVestor South-East Queensland” program, launched today, recognises that additional investment is needed if SEQ is to realise opportunities through the repair, restoration and regeneration of SEQ’s land, forests and waterways.
“Put simply, stemming the decline of our environment – including growing threats to our biodiversity, increasing fire and flood risk and the potential loss of our food security - is going to take billions not millions,” says Julie McLellan, CEO of the peak group for the environment in South East Queensland, Healthy Land & Water.
“The only way to get there is to think much bigger, and getting to landscape-scale takes landscape-scale funding and partnerships.”
She says the ENVestor initiative is pioneering a disruptive approach to environmental restoration right across a region, building a collaborative platform of government, industry, academic and community partners to take action on priority areas including degraded creeks and waterways, forest habitat and agricultural land.
“SEQ is a biodiversity hotspot that needs renewed investment in nature to build its resilience to climate threats while supporting a growing population,” she says.
“Our model is practically designed to tackle so many issues - from protecting koalas against bushfire threat, to reducing flood risk from disaster-scale flooding events that are damaging thousands of SEQ homes every few years, and if not addressed will render large areas of SEQ uninsurable.”
As the world rapidly moves towards innovative financing systems that provide a return on investment for nature restoration and repair – including through the
Australian Government’s new Nature Repair Market – ENVestor is poised to attract investors in Australia and internationally looking for impact and long-term returns.
ENVestor has already garnered strong multi-sectoral support. "We are already seeing keen interest from Federal, State, and local government, water and power utilities, corporates, scientists, academics, community groups, First Nations representatives, the insurance industry, nature markets specialists, among many others,” Ms McLellan says.
Pilot projects being designed under the program are directly tackling solutions to climate change, flooding, pollution and biodiversity loss via a model of attracting investment in a way that could pave the way for nationwide or even global uptake.
According to Landscape Finance Lab, a body which has helped incubate and finance sustainable landscape programs around the world, what's being done in South East Queensland in terms of scale and integration is breaking the mould.
“This approach is modelled on successful landscape-scale efforts around the world which are helping restore nature, drive investment, create jobs and livelihoods, and build resilience,” says Landscape Finance Lab's founder, Paul Chatterton.
The launch of ENVestor follows on the heels of the recent report of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists which found Australia’s environment is on a depressing path – with an estimated $7.3bn a year needed to stem the decline in Australia’s ecosystems – still, far less than the $33 billion a year Australians spend on their pets.
Ms McLellan says that in addition to the calls from some quarters to work towards a proactive. government funding increase by 10-fold to at least 1% of GDP (which equates to $4b in SEQ alone), that to achieve real outcomes we will need to double that investment from private and other sources.
To drive tangible results, she proposes that this figure be augmented by doubling the contributions from private and alternative sources.
“That’s why we are bringing partners together to set up a vehicle to build up to the scale of funding needed and deploy it to the areas it is most needed,” she says.
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