The World Resources Institute, Cities4Forests, the World Bank, the Global Facility for Disaster Risk Reduction (GFDRR), the African Development Bank, the Green Growth Knowledge Partnership (GGKP), the Caterpillar Foundation and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) have joined forces to evaluate the investment opportunity for nature-based solutions (NBS) infrastructure in Sub-Saharan Africa.

This partnership will develop research to identify the barriers and opportunities to scaling NBS in SSA, inform strategies on how to invest in NBS, and create enabling conditions for scaling and replication in other locations. We are focusing on NBS with a strong connection to infrastructure functionality and its impact on the urban resilience and disaster risk management (DRM), water and sanitation, energy, housing and transportation sectors.

WRI is developing a searchable NBS Project Database and has cataloged 300+ projects from publicly available online databases, with an additional 50+ projects identified through our NBS project developer survey. We are now also conducting interviews for a deep dive into the barriers and enabling conditions for advancing and scaling up NBS investment. This multi-stakeholder workshop provides another opportunity to profile case studies of NBS projects across SSA and capture lessons learned.