About the Rimba Collective
The Rimba Collective is an innovative, long-term collaboration between Consumer Goods Manufacturers (CGMs), processors, traders and growers in the agricultural commodities industry. We partner with NGOs, governments and conservation experts to deliver positive ecosystem outcomes at scale over the next 30 years.
Lestari Capital ensures the efficient and transparent functioning of the Rimba Collective. It safeguards performance-based payments and manages and expands the project portfolio, providing due diligence and project onboarding.
-
We deliver on sustainability commitments
We make verifiable claims on ecosystem impacts across nature-based commitments, livelihoods, biodiversity and climate at scale. -
We produce reliably high-quality ecosystem impacts
Our performance-based approach, from selection through onboarding, monitoring and evaluation to registration, ensures our conservation projects deliver credible, quantifiable, high-quality environmental outcomes. -
We protect and restore landscapes
Our projects protect and restore forests, carbon-rich peatland and mangroves across the sourcing landscape. Over the 30 year lifetime of the initiative, we estimate reducing and removing 150 million tons of land-based greenhouse gases. -
We improve people’s lives and strengthen their rights
We proactively engage local communities, increasing access to healthcare, education, clean water and sanitation. We also support land rights and create jobs that positively impact nature, communities and the climate. -
We protect and enhance biodiversity
Our projects have built-in biodiversity monitoring to measure the positive impacts of protecting or restoring critical habitats for rare, threatened, protected or endemic species. In Indonesia and Malaysia, these include the endangered orangutan, Asian elephant and tiger.
Supporting business to deliver for nature and communities
A RIGOROUS APPROACH FOR THE BEST ENVIRONMENTAL OUTCOMES
We work transparently with project partners and have the right tools in place to deliver integrity at every stage of the process.
- Project selection
Every project needs to deliver impact in one of three ways:- Avoidance. Ecosystem, biodiversity and community conditions will deteriorate without the project.
- Maintenance. The project will sustain healthy ecosystem, biodiversity and community conditions.
- Enhancement. The project will improve degraded ecosystem, biodiversity and community conditions.
- Project onboarding and operator selection
Every project goes through a rigorous five-step onboarding process, comprising Origination, Readiness, Feasibility, Due diligence and Service agreement. - Project monitoring and evaluation
Our comprehensive protocol includes certification and independent verification under either Plan Vivo, CCB (Climate, Community and Biodiversity), VCS (Voluntary Carbon Standard) or other standards required by law in the host country. All projects must also submit an annual report stating the ESOs (ecosystem services outcomes) achieved that year. - Ecosystem Services Registry
All ESOs are tracked and documented in a centralised registry that employs enterprise-grade security features to ensure a safe, trusted, and traceable transfer of all ESOs to our partners’ accounts.
OUR INNOVATIVE FINANCE MECHANISM
Rather than supporting individual conservation projects to offset environmental impacts, our mechanism links forest conservation finance directly to raw material procurement.
- Rimba Collective partners contribute funds to the finance mechanism proportional to their use of palm oil
- Experts in conservation implement projects that benefit nature and communities
- The projects receive funding via the mechanism in exchange for certified ecosystem outcomes
- Rimba Collective partners use the outcomes proportionately to their funding to claim towards their sustainability objectives
Because payments are performance-related, projects are incentivised to deliver. Our model is self-sustaining and scalable – which means positive outcomes for biodiversity, communities and the climate over the long term.
The finance mechanism is managed professionally and transparently by Lestari Capital, which oversees the performance, verification and delivery of all our project outcomes.
A global response to a global challenge
Our partners are leading global organizations and our finance model can be scaled and replicated to commodities all over the world.
Our first projects are in Indonesia and Malaysia, which produce 85% of the world’s palm oil and host some of the planet's most biodiverse, critically threatened ecosystems. We have plans to expand across Southeast Asia and Papua New Guinea soon.