SEDF, WWF-NL sign agreement

KARACHI: The Investment Department of the Sindh Enterprise Development Fund (SEDF) has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the World Wide Fund for Nature Netherlands (WWF-NL) to provide an enabling environment for attracting investment and to boost the country’s growth prospects, a statement said on Friday.

The MoU is aimed at creating synergies among the stakeholders and develop a pipeline of “Bankable Projects”, while de-risking investment through a landscape approach, it added.

It would enable private sector entities to co-create solutions to green and make sourcing sustainable (access to green and organic raw materials), green supply chains, processes, and ensure that the private sector can deliver conservation outcomes while simultaneously making a return on its investment, it added.

In 2019, the Dutch Fund for Climate and Development (DFCD) announced a call for WWF offices network to submit a potential landscape to pilot bankable projects on a landscape level, whereas, WWF-Pakistan submitted the Indus Delta Ecoregion as a potential landscape, which was subsequently chosen of 61 submissions worldwide.

Indus Delta Ecoregion is one of the 40 most biologically rich ecoregions in the world and it covers approximately 65 percent of the total landscape of Sindh.

SEDF, under the Investment Department, will collaborate with WWF-Pakistan to discover and pilot bankable conservation projects to attract private sector investment.

The implementation themes include climate-resilient water systems, water management, and freshwater ecosystems, forestry, climate-smart agriculture, and restoration of ecosystems to protect the environment.

The programme includes feasibility studies, including economic valuations, supply chain, private sector stakeholder mapping, socioeconomic studies, etc, specific to the Indus Delta Ecoregion; conduct workshops with the private sector stakeholders / investors to introduce them to the concept of bankable projects in Indus Delta Ecoregion, and identifying and developing potential bankable projects.