Spotlight on IFC Eco-Friendly Projects

As the world celebrates World Environment Day 2003, the IFC is taking stock of biodiversity conservation initiatives it helped launched this quarter. All are aimed at empowering local communities and engaging the private sector in managing natural resources in ways that are economically sustainable. Since February of this year, the IFC has launched innovative projects in Peru and Northern Mongolia and commissioned a Biodiversity Good Practice Guide.

In the rainforests of Peru, IFC partnered with two Peruvian NGOs to establish a poison dart frog ranching and export business. The stunningly colored frogs, currently declining in population and illegally smuggled, will help rural communities generate income from a practice that enriches the rainforest rather than continues to erode it. The project is a winner of the World Bank’s Development Marketplace competition and will receive funding from the Global Environment Facility (GEF). In addition to preserving the rainforest and decreasing other destructive agricultural practices, it is expected that the population of at least 60 Peruvian poison dart frog species will be stabilized or increased. The business also aims to employ roughly 250 campesino families.

“IFC used to focus largely on ensuring that its investments didn’t harm the environment,” says Sam Keller, Projects Officer for IFC’s Environmental Finance Group. “But now we’re increasingly looking for commercially viable investments that actually benefit the environment. The poison dart frog project is part of this trend.”

In Northern Mongolia, IFC made its first ever investment in a river conservation project that aims to both protect a threatened fish species, the Hucho taimen, and simultaneously provide a sustainable source of income to local nomadic communities. A $1 million contribution from the GEF will help the Taiman Conservation Fund, a Mongolian NGO, develop a financially sustainable conservation management system for the Eg-Urr Watershed (EUWA). EUWA, thought to be one of Asia’s wildest and most beautiful and undervalued waterways, is one of the last remaining natural habitats for this four to five foot long, 30 to 50 pound, highly sought after Siberian salmon.

This projects allows IFC to address civil society, creates a concession system to generate revenue and establishes a natural resource management regime for the region,” says Jeff Liebert Investment Officer for the Environmental Finance Group. “The goal is to develop a low-impact form of tourism, ‘catch-and-release fly fishing,’ that both complements Mongolia’s traditional Buddhist beliefs, which preclude subsistence or commercial consumption of fish resources, and yet at the same time enables the communities to benefit financially through sustainable use of their natural resources.”

Finally, as part of IFC’s global efforts to accelerate and facilitate the private sector’s acceptance and practice of sustainable development and resource use, IFC commissioned Fauna & Flora International and the International Conservation Union to produce a Biodiversity Good Practice Guide.

As one of a series of Good Practice Notes, the guide, financed by IFC’s Corporate Citizenship Facility, will address biodiversity across a range of sectors and scales of business activity. It will serve as a compass of sorts for IFC clients working in emerging markets who will need to understand how to effectively and proactively manage biodiversity issues in their business practices. The emphasis, for clients, will be on compliance and moving “beyond compliance with IFC/World Bank requirements and policies. However, the document is also expected to be a hands-on guide for a wider range of companies who are grappling with the challenges and issues of biodiversity day-to-day.

The IFC is clearly setting the trend for economically sustainable biodiversity initiatives and these three projects are just the beginning. According to Sam Keller, the next new thing on IFC’s pioneering list of biodiversity initiatives is rather revolutionary: IFC is developing an initiative to target and amend the environmentally destructive practices of an entire industry the marine aquarium trade. Stay tuned.