Program Area
Climate Finance
Winrock helps unlock climate finance to tackle urgent environmental and development challenges. A trusted partner of communities, governments, donors and the private sector in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and North America, Winrock combines technical knowledge, global perspective and on-the-ground experience to mobilize climate investments and drive transformational change. Our expertise includes policy and regulatory development, integrated climate investment planning and implementation, capacity strengthening and public and private capital mobilization. A global leader in climate mitigation, Winrock has authored many initial standards for voluntary and regulatory carbon markets and has developed GHG measurement and monitoring approaches and interactive climate impact reporting tools. A pioneer in carbon markets, we have created and deployed internationally recognized monitoring and reporting standards, helping countries and investors track progress transparently and effectively. We help build strong networks of financial institutions, impact investors and corporates, and design innovative blended finance strategies and tools to de-risk investments and attract private capital into climate solutions.
The Green Climate Fund
Winrock is proud to be selected as a Delivery Partner under the Green Climate Fund’s Readiness and Preparatory Support Programme to help countries prepare for, access and effectively deploy climate finance. The GCF is the world’s largest fund dedicated to helping developing countries respond to climate change. Established by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, the GCF focuses on assisting developing nations with both climate change adaptation and mitigation activities. Winrock’s GCF Readiness consortium, with Climate Law and Policy, assists countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Pacific to enhance climate governance, develop investment plans, design innovative financial mechanisms and build institutional capacity to access GCF funding. This critical work integrates climate priorities into national development plans and builds pipelines of bankable, climate-resilient projects.
From Africa to Asia and across the Americas, Winrock International has advanced climate finance solutions in over 60 countries, driving investment, innovation and impact worldwide.
Forestry Finance and JREDD+
As one of the few mechanisms that directly ties verified emissions reductions to finance, Jurisdictional Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (JREDD+) is a crucial pathway for forest-rich countries to unlock climate funding at scale. Winrock is a global leader in helping to shape and implement JREDD+ programs under a range of REDD+ compliance frameworks. With a reputation for pairing scientific rigor with practical application, Winrock has been a key technical partner in developing the REDD+ programs of 22 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, providing technical assistance across the three phases of REDD: readiness, implementation, and finance mobilization. Specific support includes development of national forest monitoring and information systems; forest reference levels; REDD+ strategy documents; and documentation and support to secure access to climate financing and issuance of carbon credits. Winrock’s technical assistance advances transparent and accurate emissions accounting, ensuring verified results and trusted carbon credits while strengthening jurisdictions’ long-term capacity to meet international climate commitments, such as Nationally Determined Contributions.
To unlock JREDD+ potential and ensure that high-integrity credits reach the market, Winrock provides agile, technically robust, targeted assistance that complements longer-term initiatives and directly addresses the final barriers to credit issuance. Designed to de-risk credit issuance and strengthen system readiness, Winrock provides tailored support across measurement, reporting and verification, and the validation and verification processes, while fostering stakeholder understanding and confidence through strategic communications. Our approach fills a critical gap in the JREDD+ ecosystem by bridging the space between readiness and credit issuance.
Climate impact investment consulting and tools
To make the impact investing landscape more transparent and to facilitate additional financing, Winrock works with stakeholders up and down the impact investment value chain — from communities and local partners who need investment all the way to the investors — and across the transaction life cycle from concept development to post-investment monitoring. Winrock works directly with impact investors to design, share and implement bespoke tools that leverage global best practices and cutting-edge science. For example, Winrock’s WinRes tool evaluates an investment’s potential to enhance resilience to climate risks, strengthening decision-making during pre-investment processes while unlocking long-term value aligned with climate-resilient, net zero pathways. Created through collaboration between Winrock and Acumen, WinRes was designed to assess how specific investments increase the resilience of communities to climate change. WinRes uses the Green Climate Fund Results Measurement Framework’s adaptation impact indicators as the foundation for an interactive format that allows users to identify investments that are not only resilient to risks but also create resilience benefits for communities. In partnership with the Global Environment Facility, Winrock is customizing WinRes to support the launch of the Net Zero Adaptation Finance program — a blended finance platform combining tools, advisory capacity and financial incentives to maximize the adaptive benefits of investments traditionally focused on emissions mitigation. The NZAF builds on Winrock’s expertise advising corporations including Nestlé and McCormick on net zero initiatives in agricultural supply chains. (Learn more about these services here.)
Winrock-developed tools harness cutting-edge technology, data and methodologies to produce original analyses that can be distilled to best serve global climate monitoring and reporting challenges. For example, our team utilizes scientifically robust geospatial and remote sensing solutions, including spatial modeling, using a variety of georeferenced data to meet reporting needs and maximize net GHG reductions in the agriculture, forestry and other land use sector. Other decision support tools developed by Winrock leverage scientifically sound approaches, including the Forest Landscape Restoration Carbon Storage Calculator, which estimated the amount of carbon stored by forest landscape restoration activities globally, including agroforestry, plantations and mangroves. The Watershed Ecosystem Services Tool (WESTool) leverages geospatial tools and hydrological modeling to explore how ecosystem services, land use and socioeconomic factors interact, and estimates changes in carbon stocks, greenhouse gas emissions, water quality and other ecosystem services.