Right to Regenerate: Indigenous financial innovation tackling forests’ biggest unspoken threat

To tackle the biodiversity and climate crises head-on, we must urgently shift away from extractive economic models that deplete nature. It’s time to stop viewing nature simply as an asset to be exploited and start recognizing it as a living system that demands respect, care, and regeneration. Strengthening Indigenous sovereignty is central to this transformation. By empowering Indigenous communities to reclaim their stewardship roles, we honor their profound knowledge and sustainable practices. But to enable financial capital to reach communities and regenerative initiatives requires piloting of new approaches; it requires a decentralization of financial resource governance, and the organization of project portfolios for systemic change including innovations like Bioregional Financing.

This session will tell of how, through the Kwaxala model, an Indigenous Nation in the Great Bear Rainforest in British Columbia, Canada—a globally significant carbon sink—is reclaiming land-use rights and transforming threatened forests into investable natural assets through regenerative practices, policy reform, financial innovation, and systemic change. Panelists will discuss how this unique, Indigenous-led model can not only be replicated throughout Canada , but also adapted and applied in other critical ecosystems around the globe, such as the Amazon rainforest where related efforts like the Cooling the Climate Initiative rewards Indigenous-led restoration efforts.

The panel will be moderated by Kelly Gauthier, Managing Partner of Realize Capital Partners. Realize Capital Partners is one of three fund-of-funds managers delivering the Government of Canada’s Social Finance Fund and, as part of their market-building work, launched an RFP to accelerate the development of natural capital and conservation finance solutions across Canada.

Key topics include:

How the ‘right to extract’ model holds the vast majority of the world’s ecosystems – including forests – hostage for pennies on the dollar, and how the ‘right to regenerate’ creates a true economic counterbalance.

Why Indigenous ownership and sovereignty are crucial to making regenerative forestry scalable and legitimate.

How Kwaxala’s Indigenous-led and majority owned network and Living Forest Fund investment model helps solve a key additionality problem found in many carbon credit initiatives, and is redefining financial stability and equitable investment in nature.

The role of governments in creating the enabling legislative structure to make this innovative new approach a legal possibility, exemplified by the government of British Columbia’s collaboration with Kwaxala.

How this systemic fractal model is globally applicable and already looking to be applied beyond Canada in forested regions, including the Amazon.