Market Analysis

Project: ECOM was taking a close look at how its operations, particularly its Sustainable Management Services (SMS) division, could further align with other stakeholders to find innovative value chain solutions that would help farmers adapt to climate change. This included renovation programs for coffee and cocoa and also new ways to fund forest and landscape restoration (FLR) programs. Within that context, ECOM management had been directly involved in getting the Government of Nicaragua to commit to the World Resources Institute’s (WRI) 20×20 Initiative and had also supported the recent investment of the Moringa Partnership Impact Fund in NicaFrance Outgrowers in hopes that these efforts would provide the insight to develop other similar programs locally, regionally, and globally, and would complement other efforts in development by ECOM with more traditional development partners like IFC, IABD and others. The SGE Immersion team assessed the readiness of the NicaFrance Outgrowers project as a platform on which other private and institutional stakeholders (e.g., SNV, CI, etc.) could build upon to reach the landscape scale, integrating other components (private reserves, conservation easements, insetting programs, etc.) into the core value chain. The team also evaluated the state of forest and restoration financing mechanisms to determine whether a global player like ECOM had additional roles to play in the marketplace for project finance and implementation to further accelerate the involvement of the international private sector in FLR programs. Finally, the team examined whether scaling up carbon insetting programs in ECOM supply chains could be used as a sustainable financing tool for FLR to meet the goals of programs such as WRI’s 20×20 Initiative, the Bonn Challenge, the New York Declaration of Forests, and SDG 15.3 on Land Degradation Neutrality. The team made recommendations for budgeting and the roll out of ECOM’s 2.7 million restoration commitment in Nicaragua.