The time has come to nur­ture nat­ur­al cap­i­tal.

And it is be­lieved that the re­cent­ly launched Nat­ur­al Cap­i­tal Grant Chal­lenge 2023 is one of the key steps in im­prov­ing T&T’s stand­ing in that re­gard.

The Nat­ur­al Cap­i­tal Grant has on of­fer $100,000 for small and medi­um-sized en­ter­pris­es in a bid “to in­vig­o­rate and ul­ti­mate­ly help main­stream the idea of in­cor­po­rat­ing na­ture’s val­ue in­to every­day busi­ness op­er­a­tions.

The grant is one of the ini­tia­tives of the Caribbean Nat­ur­al Cap­i­tal Hub, which was start­ed last Ju­ly, al­so in a bid to in­crease bio­di­ver­si­ty in busi­ness across the Caribbean.

“The hub is space for like-mind­ed peo­ple, who want to con­tribute to nat­ur­al cap­i­tal in the re­gion to come to­geth­er, share ideas, un­der­take ini­tia­tives, build the ca­pac­i­ty, and al­so raise cap­i­tal, at­tract and build a cap­i­tal base or nat­ur­al cap­i­tal and this is mon­ey, fund­ing. So we’ve cre­at­ed this space where we’re do­ing a num­ber of things,” said Keisha Gar­cia, en­vi­ron­men­tal, so­cial and gov­er­nance (ESG) Nat­ur­al Cap­i­tal Lead for ANSA Mer­chant Bank Lim­it­ed.

“What we want to do, we want to re­al­ly be thought lead­ers, to gen­er­ate thought lead­er­ship on the is­sue of nat­ur­al cap­i­tal in the Caribbean,” said Gar­cia

But what ex­act­ly is Nat­ur­al Cap­i­tal?

“Nat­ur­al cap­i­tal refers to the stock of as­sets that we have in na­ture. Whether that be re­lat­ed to air, land, soils, wa­ter, fresh­wa­ter, coastal ma­rine or bio­di­ver­si­ty. Peo­ple some­times use nat­ur­al cap­i­tal and bio­di­ver­si­ty, those terms in­ter­change­ably, but they’re not ex­act­ly the same. Be­cause bio­di­ver­si­ty would be the liv­ing com­po­nent of nat­ur­al cap­i­tal. So nat­ur­al cap­i­tal in­cludes things like the soil and the air and the wa­ter with­in which bio­di­ver­si­ty ex­ists,’ said Gar­cia.

“The rea­son that we use the word cap­i­tal, is that cap­i­tal refers to wealth, you know, some form of wealth, and nat­ur­al cap­i­tal, it’s self-ex­plana­to­ry. It’s the wealth and we don’t just mean fi­nan­cial wealth here. We talk about our health or well-be­ing, our abil­i­ty to en­joy life, and things like that. All of those things are tied to the nat­ur­al en­vi­ron­ment.”

Gar­cia ex­plained that in many cas­es nat­ur­al re­sources pro­vid­ed pro­tec­tion or mit­i­gat­ed the ef­fects of cli­mate change.

“Just nat­ur­al ecosys­tems stand­ing on their own. That’s a ser­vice that’s that nat­ur­al cap­i­tal there that we’re talk­ing about a free ser­vice that they’re giv­ing us right. So in terms of the cli­mate dis­course, when we think about how we build adap­ta­tion to cli­mate, well, we build adap­ta­tion to cli­mate through, for ex­am­ple, en­sur­ing that our coastal ecosys­tems are in­tact.

“Think about our ex­po­sure to things like storms and hur­ri­canes and stuff. En­sur­ing that our man­groves, sea­grass, and coral reef sys­tems or coastal ecosys­tems are in­tact, would pro­vide us with some shore­line pro­tec­tion, for ex­am­ple, en­sur­ing that our hill­side forests are in­tact or in the North­ern Range, for ex­am­ple, help to pro­vide what we call pro­tec­tion and ecosys­tem ser­vice which is pro­tec­tion against flood­ing and land slip­page, “ she said.

The Cap­i­tal hub is fo­cus­ing on ex­pand­ing the Caribbean’s Nat­ur­al Cap­i­tal, es­pe­cial­ly in the face of sus­tain­abil­i­ty chal­lenges and cli­mate change im­pacts.

The grant, which is a col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween ANSA Mer­chant Bank and the Crop­per Foun­da­tion, is one such ini­tia­tive that is geared to­ward tar­get­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty ini­tia­tives.

It is hoped that the grant helps get this push from lo­cal small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es (SMEs) and star­tups who, ac­cord­ing to Caribbean De­vel­op­ment Bank 2016 da­ta, make up be­tween 70 and 80 per cent of busi­ness­es in the re­gion, and con­tribute to 60 to 70 per cent of GDP, and ac­count for ap­prox­i­mate­ly 50 per cent of em­ploy­ment in the re­gion.

The top three projects will re­ceive fi­nanc­ing and busi­ness de­vel­op­ment sup­port to im­ple­ment in­no­v­a­tive busi­ness so­lu­tions that seek to pre­serve and pro­tect this coun­try’s bio­di­ver­si­ty.

At the start of the last month, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of ANSA Mer­chant Bank, Gre­go­ry Hill, an­nounced the Nat­ur­al Cap­i­tal Grant Chal­lenge 2023 at the Am­cham T&T ESG Con­fer­ence.

“We launched the SME chal­lenge at the Am­Cham con­fer­ence. It’s the first of its kind for us, where we’re invit­ing ap­pli­ca­tions right now, from SMEs. We’re not be­ing pre­scrip­tive at all about what types of busi­ness­es they should have, ex­cept that they should be reg­is­tered and ei­ther they are al­ready un­der­tak­ing some type of nat­ur­al cap­i­tal, like con­ser­va­tion pro­tec­tion work, or they had these ideas and they just don’t know how to bring it to life in their busi­ness. We’ll be work­ing with peo­ple like that to see how we could help them to im­prove their prac­tices,” said Gar­cia.

At the launch of the chal­lenge, Hill not­ed the im­por­tance of hav­ing cor­po­rate en­ti­ties walk the talk with re­spect to the en­vi­ron­ment.

Hill not­ed the link be­tween bio­di­ver­si­ty and cli­mate, em­pha­sis­ing the need to pre­serve what we have in T&T and the wider re­gion.

He said, “The ini­tia­tive goes be­yond beach clean-ups and lit­ter­ing to find pock­ets in our ecosys­tem in the re­gion that needs spe­cif­ic in­vest­ment and preser­va­tion such as wa­ter sources and wildlife. This is a call to ac­tion.”

Gar­cia ad­mit­ted that she had been pre­vi­ous­ly dis­heart­ened by the lack of cor­po­rate sup­port giv­en to en­vi­ron­men­tal NGOs in the past, but felt that this col­lab­o­ra­tion had fi­nal­ly found syn­er­gy be­tween those en­ti­ties.

“That part­ner­ship is unique. It is huge­ly unique we are de­vel­op­ing a pro­to­type here for how we can build these part­ner­ships be­tween the pri­vate sec­tor and NGO to make a re­al dif­fer­ence. Be­cause usu­al­ly, the NGOs lack the cap­i­tal,” she said

She ex­plained that Hill’s ap­proach to these new ini­tia­tives un­der­lined that there was a greater un­der­stand­ing of what was re­quired.

She said, “This guy is so vi­sion­ary. He saw the links be­tween nat­ur­al cap­i­tal and cli­mate very ear­ly on. And what we know from sci­ence, is that if we do not start to ad­dress nat­ur­al cap­i­tal, we won’t make the head­way that we need to on the cli­mate port­fo­lio be­cause nat­ur­al cap­i­tal and cli­mate, cli­mate change, cli­mate adap­ta­tion, cli­mate re­silience, cli­mate mit­i­ga­tion, they are in­ex­tri­ca­bly linked.”

Gar­cia said the re­sponse to the grant and by ex­ten­sion the hub, had been ex­treme­ly pos­i­tive.

She said, “At the mo­ment, we have over as I said, over 100 peo­ple sub­scribed to the hub it­self., I al­ready have about 10 ap­pli­ca­tions to the grant when grow­ing and it’s on­ly been open for about a week. So things are hap­pen­ing and I’m get­ting peo­ple writ­ing in and call­ing, you know, say­ing that I think I have some­thing to do with nat­ur­al cap­i­tal, but I’m not sure that has to do with nat­ur­al cap­i­tal. Can you please ex­plain to me what it means? And then as I start to ex­plain it in the way that I’m ex­plain­ing it here, peo­ple say, this is what I’ve been do­ing all along!”

Gar­cia said this was heart­en­ing as there had been en­vi­ron­men­tal funds es­tab­lished be­fore which had seen lit­tle to no pos­i­tive move­ment there­after and she not­ed that this strug­gle had been recog­nised by for­mer Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the Unit­ed Na­tions, Kofi An­nan when he stat­ed: “Our biggest chal­lenge in this new cen­tu­ry is to take an idea that seems ab­stract—sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment—and turn it in­to a re­al­i­ty for all the world’s peo­ple.” Over 20 years on, the glob­al com­mu­ni­ty con­tin­ues to grap­ple with the grow­ing chal­lenge of bal­anc­ing hu­man-en­vi­ron­ment in­ter­ac­tions in a bid to fa­cil­i­tate more sus­tain­able forms of so­cio-eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment.”