From natural capital potential to investable opportunity

NCIT and the African Natural Capital Alliance are working together to help make nature-positive projects across Africa easier to understand, develop, finance and scale.

Africa’s landscapes, ecosystems and communities hold extraordinary potential for climate resilience, biodiversity recovery and inclusive economic opportunity. Yet many high-impact nature projects still struggle to cross the divide between an early idea and investment. Through its partnership with ANCA, NCIT is helping build the practical market foundations needed to close that gap.

Now, through co-chairing ANCA’s Commercial Opportunities Working Group, NCIT is helping turn collective expertise into tools and pathways that can connect project developers, asset owners, investors, insurers and public partners around financeable nature solutions.

The opportunity

Nature-positive investment needs better pathways

Nature-based and natural-capital projects can generate resilience, livelihoods, biodiversity benefits and climate outcomes. But promising opportunities often encounter three connected barriers long before capital can flow at scale.

Market barrier	What it means in practice	What the partnership is doing
Unclear risk language	Investors, insurers and project developers can describe the same nature-related risk in different ways, making due diligence slower and harder to compare.	Building a common, investor-readable language for identifying and communicating material nature-related risks.
Gaps in capital readiness	Early-stage projects may have strong impact potential but lack the evidence, structure or preparation needed to meet commercial expectations.	Defining clearer readiness thresholds and practical evidence requirements across the project journey.
Weak connection between capital and opportunity	Appropriate finance exists, but projects and capital providers are not always matched at the right stage or with the right risk appetite.	Mapping capital options and creating better routes for matchmaking between projects and financiers.

The partnership’s focus is not to create theory for its own sake. It is to build on credible existing approaches, adapt what already works, and test practical outputs with the people who will use them.

The partnership journey

From collaboration to market leadership

A shared starting point

NCIT began engaging with ANCA around a shared conviction: Africa’s nature-positive transition must be shaped through African leadership, stronger market coordination and more practical connections between environmental outcomes and financial decision-making.

Contributing capability and perspective

As the partnership developed, NCIT contributed expertise in nature and climate risk, project development, stakeholder engagement, evidence synthesis and donor-facing market development. This helped strengthen the link between ANCA’s strategic ambition and the practical needs of investors, implementers and communities.

Supporting ANCA’s market-building agenda

NCIT’s involvement expanded alongside ANCA’s evolution as a platform that convenes financial institutions, project developers, policymakers, knowledge partners and real-economy actors around nature-positive finance. The shared aim was clear: move from fragmented activity toward coordinated pathways for investment and impact.

Helping shape commercial action — 2026

The Commercial Opportunities Working Group confirmed its focus on derisking and capital readiness. Members voted to organise the work around three complementary workstreams: a shared risk language, capital mapping and matchmaking, and a project staging model.

Co-chairing the next phase — now

NCIT now co-chairs the Commercial Opportunities Working Group, alongside Working Group leadership and with Secretariat support. This role helps convene diverse expertise, maintain momentum between meetings, connect task-team learning and ensure the group is oriented toward useful, achievable outputs that can be tested with market actors.

Why ANCA

An Africa-led platform for nature finance

ANCA brings together institutions and practitioners seeking to put nature at the heart of financial decision-making in Africa. Its strategic direction combines nature-finance mobilisation, improved access to nature-related data and influence in regional and global conversations on sustainable finance.

The Alliance is designed to do more than convene. It provides a platform through which financial institutions, policymakers, funders, project developers and knowledge partners can identify barriers, share lessons and develop coordinated solutions. Its working groups—covering commercial opportunities, TNFD adoption, nature data and regulatory engagement—create practical routes from dialogue to action.

Suggested proof-point strip, subject to current validation:

Africa-led network spanning financial and non-financial institutions
More than 100 member institutions across 45 African countries
More than £1 trillion in assets under management represented across members
Convening power across banks, insurers, investment funds, project developers, regulators and technical partners

Why NCIT

A bridge between evidence, markets and delivery

NCIT brings a practical, systems-oriented contribution to the ANCA partnership. Its role is to help translate complex nature and climate challenges into clear propositions, collaborative processes and implementable routes to impact.

NCIT’s contribution

Market insight: Helping identify the practical barriers that prevent high-potential nature projects from reaching investors and other capital providers.
Nature and climate expertise: Bringing an integrated understanding of physical risk, resilience, biodiversity, land use and project-level impact.
Convening and facilitation: Supporting productive collaboration among actors who may use different technical languages, operate on different timelines or assess value differently.
Evidence into action: Turning emerging frameworks, research and market experience into usable tools, decision aids and narratives.
Partnership development: Creating donor- and investor-relevant pathways for piloting, testing and scaling market-enabling solutions.

This is a catalytic role: helping make it easier for the right people, capital and evidence to meet at the point where they can create durable outcomes.

Commercial Opportunities Working Group

Turning momentum into commercial pathways

The Commercial Opportunities Working Group is ANCA’s collaborative platform for advancing nature-positive investment, finance solutions and commercialisation of natural-capital assets across Africa. It brings together actors across banking, insurance, investment, project development, advisory services and the wider nature-finance ecosystem.

Its purpose is to help catalyse private investment, improve communication between investors and developers, identify investable opportunities and enable shared learning on the finance mechanisms that can support nature, climate resilience and inclusive development.

Current focus: derisking and capital readiness

Following member discussion and a vote, the Working Group has aligned around a clear focus area: derisking and capital readiness. The group has established three member-led task teams, each addressing a different point in the journey from project concept to investable opportunity.

How the group works

Member-led task teams: Participants self-select into the workstream where they can make the strongest contribution.
Asynchronous progress: Task teams advance their work between full Working Group sessions, enabling focused development and flexible participation.
Secretariat coordination: The Secretariat supports logistics, contact-sharing, milestones, meeting administration and alignment across workstreams; it does not dictate the substantive direction of task-team outputs.
Learning through testing: Early outputs will be shared and tested through relevant investor, policy and nature-finance forums, then refined through feedback.
Achievable, practical outputs: The group prioritises adapting and consolidating credible existing frameworks where possible, rather than building new tools from scratch.

Three task teams

Shared Risk Language

The challenge: Nature-related risks are not always defined, assessed or communicated consistently across project developers, banks, insurers and capital-market participants. That makes it harder to compare projects, establish materiality and price risk with confidence.

The objective: Develop a common, investor-readable language for describing and presenting nature-related risk—initially with a focus on physical risks associated with natural-capital degradation and loss, such as deforestation-linked flooding and other extreme-weather impacts.

What the team will do:

Define nature-related risk for this workstream and develop a shared view of materiality across different user groups.
Anchor the approach in the TNFD LEAP framework, especially the Assess phase, and align terminology with IFRS/ISSB sustainability disclosure standards.
Review existing taxonomies and tools, including PESTLE and SWOT approaches, to identify material that can be adapted.
Produce a practical common risk taxonomy or packaging template that project developers and implementers can use when presenting opportunities to investors.

Why it matters: A shared risk language can reduce friction in due diligence, strengthen dialogue between capital providers and project teams, and improve the consistency of investor-facing project information.

Illustrative output: A TNFD-aligned nature-risk template that helps a project team explain what risks exist, why they are material, what evidence supports the assessment and how risks are being managed.

Capital Mapping and Matchmaking

The challenge: A project’s financing needs change over time. Early-stage ideas often need grants, public support or catalytic capital; later phases may require commercial debt, equity, blended finance, insurance or offtake arrangements. Without a clear map, strong projects can seek the wrong type of capital at the wrong moment.

The objective: Map the sources of capital available to nature projects in Africa and help connect project opportunities to the capital providers, instruments and risk appetites most suited to their stage of development.

What the team will do:

Identify relevant capital sources and financial instruments across the nature-project lifecycle, including grants, public funding, development assistance, seed finance, impact investment, commercial finance, sustainable finance and offtake arrangements.
Build on existing resources, including the BIOFIN catalogue of finance solutions, rather than duplicate established work.
Explore how project developers can be matched to funders and investors according to project stage, financing need, risk profile and thematic focus.
Help clarify what information capital providers need in order to assess whether an opportunity is a plausible fit.

Why it matters: Better matching can save time, reduce avoidable transaction costs and help capital providers see a more credible pipeline of opportunities that align with their mandates.

Illustrative output: A capital-mapping and matchmaking guide that links typical project stages to relevant finance types, investor profiles and evidence requirements.

Project Staging Model

The challenge: Investors and developers often lack a shared, practical picture of what a nature project needs at each point on the path to investment. A promising project can lose momentum if it does not know which technical, legal, commercial and impact evidence must be in place before approaching a specific type of funder.

The objective: Create a staged model that describes how a nature project progresses from early discovery to capital readiness, with clear thresholds for commercial, legal, technical and impact readiness and, potentially, a concise evidence checklist.

What the team will do:

Define practical stages from project discovery through scoping, design, preparation, set-up, implementation and expansion or close.
Clarify the different requirements associated with each stage, including site screening, additionality, baseline data, technical feasibility, financial feasibility, legal feasibility, organisational capacity and stakeholder alignment.
Identify the role of memoranda of understanding, government engagement, independent studies, project design documentation, monitoring, reporting and verification.
Draw on existing reference points and learning from credible market actors, certification approaches and project-preparation platforms.

Indicative stages:

Stage	Indicative purpose	Typical readiness focus
Project discovery	Identify a potential opportunity	Initial concept, site/asset understanding, early hypothesis
Scoping and assessment	Test viability	Pre-screening, baseline information, stakeholder and government engagement, early market and technical analysis
Design and preparation	Build a financeable proposition	Feasibility work, project team, legal structure, financial model, project documentation and independent review
Set-up and establishment	Mobilise for delivery	Agreements, operational systems, implementation capacity, monitoring architecture
Implementation and expansion	Deliver, learn and scale	Verified progress, impact reporting, performance management, growth or close-out planning

Why it matters: A common staging model can make project preparation more transparent, enable funders to target catalytic support earlier, and help developers build the evidence required for later-stage investment.

Illustrative output: A project-readiness rubric with a short evidence checklist that project teams can use to identify gaps and prepare for the next financing conversation.

From dialogue to delivery

A coordinated route to usable outputs

The three task teams are distinct, but they are designed to work as one system.

Shared Risk Language clarifies how nature-related risk is identified and communicated.
Project Staging Model clarifies what evidence and readiness look like at each development stage.
Capital Mapping and Matchmaking clarifies which forms of capital and partners are most relevant at each stage.

Together, these workstreams can help turn an early-stage project into a clearer proposition: one that is easier to assess, easier to prepare and better connected to suitable sources of finance.

A simple user journey

A project developer identifies a restoration, sustainable-agriculture or conservation opportunity. The staging model helps the team understand its current readiness and priority gaps. The shared-risk template helps communicate material risks and risk-management measures in an investor-readable format. Capital mapping then helps identify the types of finance and partners that are appropriate for the project’s next stage.

Milestones and learning

Building, testing and refining in public

The Working Group is using high-value regional and international moments to test early thinking, share progress and invite practical challenge from peers, financiers and partners.

Timing	Milestone	Role in the work
September 2026	New York Climate Week and Building Bridges, Geneva	Informal testing, partner conversations and reference points for emerging thinking
6–8 October 2026	Third Africa Policy Forum on Natural Capital (APFNC 3)	First external milestone; an opportunity to connect outputs to the climate, biodiversity and development-finance discussion from an investor perspective
October 2026	Carbon Markets Africa, AFSIC and relevant biodiversity-business convenings	Opportunities to compare emerging outputs with market practice and investor priorities
November–December 2026	Nature, water and related international forums	Selective opportunities for continued learning and partner engagement
November 2026	Full Commercial Opportunities Working Group meeting	Progress review, cross-task-team learning and agreement on next steps
By March 2027	Target horizon for final outputs and recommendations	Consolidated, practical deliverables ready for adoption, piloting or scale-up

What donor support enables:

Fund the market infrastructure behind investable projects

Donor and strategic-partner support can help turn collaborative working-group outputs into tested tools, shared public goods and real-world pilots. Investment would not replace private capital; it would help create the conditions in which private and blended capital can move with greater confidence.

Priority support areas

Tool development and validation: Support the technical development, user testing and refinement of the risk-language template, capital map and project-readiness rubric.
Project-developer and investor pilots: Apply the outputs with selected real projects and capital providers across different geographies and nature-based sectors.
Convening and market dialogue: Enable structured investor–developer exchanges, peer learning and evidence-led challenge sessions at priority African and global forums.
Capacity strengthening: Support practical guidance, training and facilitation for project developers, financial institutions, insurers and public partners.
Learning and dissemination: Produce open, Africa-relevant learning products that share what works, where barriers remain and what can be scaled.
Impact tracking: Monitor use of the tools, projects supported, finance conversations enabled, investment pathways strengthened and climate, biodiversity and community outcomes associated with the work.

Partnership proposition

Support NCIT and ANCA to build the practical bridges between nature-positive ambition and investment-ready action—so more African-led projects can move from potential to durable finance, measurable impact and scale.