Supporting People, Conserving Nature, In The Caucasus

Caucasus Nature Fund
54 rue de Clichy
75009 Paris | France
Tel.: +33 (0)1 48 74 31 93
Fax: +33 (0)1 48 74 62 52
contact@caucasus-naturefund.org

LEGAL INFORMATION

CNF HISTORY & SUPPORTING DOCUMENTS

Our Story

From left to right: former U.S. Ambassador to Georgia, John Teft; CNF ED David Morrison; Georgian Minister of Environment Protection Giorgi Khachidze; and Ken Mabery of the US Parks Service.

After the Soviet Union disintegrated in the early 1990s, environmentalists led by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) discovered the amazing biodiversity in the Caucasus. By 2003 WWF had determined that a conservation trust fund should be established to support the region. It began to persuade the German government—through its Ministry of Economic Cooperation (BMZ) and its development bank (KfW)—to integrate protected areas development into the environmental component of a new regional foreign policy initiative. When Conservation International (CI) of the US and the Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund (CEPF) also agreed to support, the seed capital to establish CNF was assured.

We are young, agile and effective.

Since its launch in 2008, CNF has grown rapidly. We have doubled our seed funding and now support five national parks in Georgia and Armenia on a long-term basis.

We signed our first partnership agreement with the government of Georgia in 2008. An agreement with Armenia followed in early 2009, when CNF also made its first grant—providing emergency fire-fighting equipment to Georgia’s Borjomi Kharaguali National Park (BKNP), where fires had broken out during the brief 2008 Georgian-Russian war. In 2010 we began our regular grant program with pilot projects in Armenia's Khosrov Forest and Georgia's BKNP.

In 2010 we also came to the aid of two newly created parks in Armenia providing smaller "emergency grants" because the state’s budget process had not taken them into account. In 2011 CNF is providing long-term support for two protected areas in Georgia and three in Armenia.

Work in Azerbaijan awaits confirmation from the Ministry that it wants to proceed towards a durable partnership with us to conserve protected areas. Our long-term vision is to provide support to the entire system of national parks and nature reserves in the region.

We are innovative, transparent and efficient.

Our business model was conceived based on 15 years of experience with CTF best practices, and we share lessons learned from our model with the global CTF movement. One of our key tenets is the implementation of financial and technical audits that accompany our grants. Each park is required to report, not only on the money provided by CNF, but also on its entire budget. This allows us to monitor that CNF’s funds are used appropriately and that our grants are augmenting— not replacing—government investment in the parks.

We also seek to follow best practices in governance and reporting and believe we are at the top of the class for an organization of our size. We invite you to consult the supporting documentation that appears below.

We are scaling up.

CNF's brief history is one of remarkable progress towards achieving both its operational and funding goals. The idea for a regional conservation trust fund for the South Caucasus became reality in 2008 after working its way from a feasibility phase to a political launch at a conference in Berlin attended by the environmental ministers of Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the middle of the last decade. We began operations with sponsoring commitments of $10 million from our initial donors. In just over three years, CNF has managed to more than double our initial funding. We will be spending about € 400,000 in the region in 2011 protecting more than 200,000 hectares of beautiful wilderness. With our basic operational costs and some protected area funding covered by our endowment, additional funds we receive can go straight to the field. If we can achieve our next fundraising objective and add a further $13 million over the next several years ($24 million if Azerbaijan joins), we can tackle the urgent task of increasing our portfolio of hectares protected in Georgia and Armenia to more than 500,000. This will more than triple the number of hectares we protect and substantially increase our efficiency. A sustained effort to complete the fundraising job is underway.