Indigenous bioeconomy opportunities can be classified into 3 categories:
Environmental Services
The financial partnership is structured around “payments for ecosystem services”, tied to quantified carbon, biodiversity or water benefits. The approach provides economic incentives to Indigenous organisations for conserving forests while offering companies with tangible, credible and measured contributions towards their climate & nature objectives (i.e. corporate ESG frameworks).
Deforestation-free, Indigenous-led commodities
The financial partnership takes the form of sustainable sourcing and trade frameworks, supported by deforestation-free certification and Indigenous sourcing credentials. This enables Indigenous producers to generate income and access premium markets, while providing companies with responsible, traceable, inclusive and nature-positive supply chains. Typically involves commodities such as coffee, cocoa, herbs, oils and natural cosmetic ingridients.
Cultural assets
The financial partnership is structured around licensing, marketing or commercialisation agreements for Indigenous cultural assets, based on respect, consent and equitable benefit-sharing arrangements. This creates economic opportunities for Indigenous people – often women – while enabling companies broaden their creative, advertising and branding activities through responsible business practices, including the promotion of the cultural heritage.
Hosted and managed under the UNDP Climate Promise and the Climate & Forests team,
in cooperation with UNDP country offices, Local Action hub, and the Small Grants Programme.
Guided by a gender-balanced, multi-stakeholder Advisory Council,
composed of Indigenous Peoples and entrepreneurs as well as environmental champions from private companies and philanthropic networks.
Funding
Under scoping
Public donors, private partnership fees, philanthropic donations.
UNDP applies robust social, environmental, governance and fiduciary safeguards.
UNDP has implemented a pilot version of the platform in 2024-2025, with successful financial partnerships such as:
UNDP x Lavazza
UNDP and Lavazza partnership to certify and market first ever deforestation-free coffee from Ecuador, a pilot being scaled to other countries.
The collaboration between UNDP, the Government of Ecuador, and Lavazza has been selected as a finalist for the World Economic Forum’s Giving to Amplify Earth Action (GAEA) Awards under the Moving Business for Climate Impact category. The nomination is in recognition of its efforts to tackle forest loss resulting from agricultural expansion of coffee.
Sacred Forests
Our founding partners at Sacred Forests bridge brands with Indigenous territories and their seed funding helped support the design phase of the Platform. They have developed a model for rewarding “conservation as a service” in an effort to correct the “Trillion Dollar Blindspot”.
Sacred Forests is working with Rituals to scale their first joint pilot with the Arhuaco Indigenous communities in the Sierra Nevada:
ASOARHUACO
The Arhuaco partner organization, ASOARHUACO, won the UNDP Equator Prize in 2024 for their longstanding efforts securing livelihoods and protecting nature. Watch a short film about their work below:
Rurban
Rurban connect Indigenous artisans with fashion brands. We connected them with Hakhu Amazon, an Indigenous Kichwa designer and women artisan collective:
