Chile
Chile Nature Fund
The Chile Nature Fund is a foundation created through a public-private effort to mobilize and manage resources for large-scale nature conservation in Chile, with a long-term vision, and incorporating the territories and communities in its management. This fund will activate new sources of financing from the private sector and multilateral organizations to complement the State's economic efforts to meet national and international conservation and climate action goals. With a strong spirit of collaboration, and the best standards of probity, transparency and procedures, Fondo Naturaleza Chile seeks to replicate a successful model of financing and investment for conservation, which has already been widely validated internationally. The creation of this fund is very relevant given the challenge that exists in Chile in relation to the funding gap for biodiversity conservation. In the case of marine protected areas alone, the budget deficit for their operation in 2020 was 96% (-$7,607 million Chilean pesos), so one of the urgent tasks of the fund is to ensure the financial sustainability of Chilean conservation in the long term.
Fondo Naturaleza Chile has defined two priority areas of action that include marine and terrestrial areas:
1. Marine Protected Areas Program. This program seeks to finance the fifth largest network of marine protected areas in the world, in conjunction with the State. This will generate a concrete and replicable case in the region and the world for the effective protection of more than 30% of Chile's ocean, promoting the effective management of these areas by 2030.
Video Marine Protected Areas Program: https://youtu.be/-8A_AlhkGzU
2. Watershed Program, which is in the design stage and seeks to support conservation projects that increase the resilience of watersheds, demonstrating that economic recovery based on nature and local communities is possible.
Data from Chile:
- About 20% of the Chilean territory, is under different conservation modalities, safeguarding a valuable heritage of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
- However, Chile is among the 10 countries that dedicate the least funding to biodiversity in the world.
- Chile's system of marine protected areas is the fifth largest in the world (after the USA, Australia, France and New Zealand), covering more than 150 million hectares, equivalent to 43% of the exclusive economic zone.
Photo credit: Alejandra Lafón, on loan from Chile's Ministry of Environment