(Corrects Collective membership, coverage of FKL venture)

The Rimba Collective is on course to deliver $1 billion for private sector-enabled forest protection and restoration to more than 500,000 hectares in Southeast Asia and is launching an incubation vehicle to kickstart projects to go beyond that, a conference heard this week.

The Collective was launched in 2021 by financiers Lestari Capital and backed by palm oil consuming firms Nestle, Unilever, PepsiCo, and Procter & Gamble. It is on course to reaching its targeted scale by the end of 2025, Michal Zrust, CEO of Lestari Capital, told the sixth GLF Investment Case Symposium in Luxembourg on Tuesday.

“The Rimba Collective is not a concept, it is now operational, it’s running, it’s actually delivering the finance on the ground and it is scaling,” he said.

The initiative has deployed $70 million to support multiple project partners covering more than 100,000 ha across 21 project areas mainly in Indonesia since beginning work ten months ago.

“We’re scaling this to 200,000 hectares by the end of this year and a half million hectares by 2026, but we want to go above that,” Zrust told the event.

The Rimba Collective operates as a “conservation outcome purchasing mechanism”, locking its members into 25-year contracts to commit to annual payments linked to their level of palm oil procurement.

This funding is pooled and put towards conservation projects, both within the palm oil supply chain and more remote pristine territories where action acts as a risk prevention measure for areas that could potentially be used for supply chains in future.

The backers then receive independently verified delivery of ecosystem services such as enhanced biodiversity, water improvement, and carbon sequestration.

These certified outcomes are retired in registries, allowing the companies to support corporate sustainability claims and reported annually under their membership of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

Palm oil processor Wilmar International was a development partner in the Rimba Collective but has not so far become a contributor.

“We are in discussions with a number of [palm oil] processor and trader companies, but they have been far slower than the consumer goods firms,” Zrust told Carbon Pulse. “This is disappointing, given the large footprint they have in the landscape.”

‘INFINITELY SCALABLE’

“This system is actually infinitely scalable, it’s adaptable to other commodities,” said Zrust.

“We are already looking at the rubber and garment industries. Coffee, cocoa, soy of course, are all possibilities where such a system could be deployed. The demand is really ever increasing.”

He flagged companies in the Consumer Goods Forum’s Forest Positive Coalition of Action as one such source of potential demand, noting that these firms are now calculating their land footprint that they will then, hopefully, seek to conserve.

“There are emerging developments such as biodiversity credits and commitments to biodiversity specifically, whether it’s from IT companies or companies again within the food and land use sector, said Zrust.

“And regulatory developments are really exciting because I think that the only really credible way to deliver on that de-risking and that mitigation is to proactively support conservation on the ground in the supply base areas,” he added.

INCUBATING FOR SCALE

While achieving on the Rimba Collective’s initial targets, the venture is now launching an initiative to increase that ambition by helping to ready a project pipeline.

“We know that the demand is there to scale beyond our target. We need the projects that align with the demand itself. We need the projects to be delivering the outcomes that are actually being sought.”

Zrust said the corporate focus on carbon projects had been “a bit tricky”, explaining that rather than focusing on projects with “carbon with biodiversity co-benefits”, the focus should be on “nature with carbon co-benefits”.

“It is sometimes a struggle to justify the business case, when talking about supporting projects that are outside of the supply chain,” he added, noting that firms preferred supply chain-linked projects that counted towards science-based targets or other goals.

The Rimba Collective launched on Tuesday a new “incubation readiness” fund, initially drawing on a donation of around $1 million from Nestle, that would be used to give grants to prepare projects.

“There is a really good opportunity here for other donors to co-finance, where these sums would require evidence that projects are maturing to a point where they are not dependent on donors for the rest of their lifespan,” Zrust said.

“That is where the Rimba Collective comes in, because we effectively are then able to finance the operational costs of those projects at a later stage,” he added.

Zrust announced that the first recipient of the fund would be the Forum Konservasi Leuser (FKL) in Indonesia’s Aceh province, which focuses on trying to protect 2.6 mln ha of land. FKL will team up with Lestari Capital and forest management company Form International to focus in on a smaller area of around 100,000 ha.

By Ben Garside – ben@carbon-pulse.com

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