We help institutions grow at the interface of financing and sustainability.

How We Can Help

  • Data

    We take time to understand internal systems, and design protocols and standards for ESG reporting needs in line with international standards.

  • Reporting

    Once data collection protocols are in place, a sustainability report can help you communicate with your stakeholders. Vana builds internal capacity for report production, managing data collection and collation, the write-up, and design.

  • Offsetting

    Emissions are often in many cases difficult to abate. Offsetting your emissions is a valid and crucial part of a net-zero strategy and is necessary to achieve climate goals. Vana’s control over our own nature projects can enables better stewardship over your climate action.

  • Project scaling

    Vana uses its expertise in investment, project management, and forestry to scale nature-based solutions. This includes advisory services to bring projects to international standards, growth strategy setting, and financing.

Consulting Case Study: The Canadian International School of Hong Kong

We are helping The Canadian International School of Hong Kong (CDNIS) with their climate change and sustainability needs while engaging their largest stakeholder: students.

This has included establishing data collection systems to account for their greenhouse gas emissions, a data management strategy and plan, coordinating with multiple stakeholders, and wider sustainability strategy-and target-setting.

Consulting Case Study: RECOFTC

The importance of community forests

Community forestry can be understood as an approach to natural resource management, centred on the principles that local people have the capacity and right to manage forests, and that their participation improves forest governance and management.

Community forests are usually held and governed collectively with rules and institutions drafted by rural communities at the local scale. This bestows great advantages most notably by increasing multi-stakeholder cooperation and collective rural resilience in food security, climate change adaptation, and the protection of communities’ basic land rights.

About RECOFTC

RECOFTC is a Bangkok-headquartered NGO with offices in seven Southeast Asian nations dedicated to supporting local communities to secure their land and resource rights, stop deforestation, find alternative livelihoods and foster gender equity using the community forest framework.

Their core donors include the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), the Swedish International Government Development Agency (Sida), and the Royal Thai Government.

What challenges are community forests facing?

The seeding and support of community forest have mostly relied on a donor-based model. This is in large part due to high risks, both real and perceived, of investing in community forest-related development. Such pressures compel many communities and landowners to convert their forests to other more lucrative land uses. Higher wages are also causing a large youth outflow to urban areas, leaving the future of community forests in question.

How can community forest-linked microcredit help solve these problems?

The provision of credit by community forests institutions is one solution. Creating community forest-linked microcredit involves establishing a facility managed by the principal community forest institution at the local level, commonly termed the Community Forest Management Committee.

With seed capital, the facility can provide credit to community forest members and generate revenue from credit which is then by large earmarked for the protection and the development of community forests.

How Vana helped

Given that the seed funding for community forests is already under strain, community forest-linked credit need to be financially viable for independence and attract private investment.

Vana conducted site visits of over 20 community forests in four Cambodian provinces in October 2022 to assess conditions and common practices on the ground, as well as interviewed key management personnel at RECOFTC Cambodia.

Vana’s recommendations aimed to bring international industry best-practice in microfinance to RECOFTC’s community forest-linked credit to increase its bankability in a way that preserved community autonomy and agency at the local level, using its track record in financial inclusion from emerging and frontier markets.

Now in the process of implementing changes, RECOFTC hopes to scale the programme with private capital using blended finance structures.