In Costa Rica, The Incubator is assessing biochar’s potential to enhance ecosystem service delivery, such as carbon sequestration, through enhanced biomass production and carbon storage in soils.  

The Incubator facilitates the development of Social Impact Assessments in alignment with CCB standards  

Incubator Workshops provide early-stage payment for ecosystem services (PES) and land-based carbon projects with focused training on everything from financial management to silvicultural techniques  

The Incubator Project in Nudo del Azuay, Ecuador, is an example of a PES scheme for hydrological services (such as sediment control and flow stabilization) which provides upland land holders with incentives to implement conservation and sustainable use activities 

The Incubator works to scale up the results of its interventions by formalizing institutional capacity in regions of operation, creating precedent for future projects, and informing government policy making from the local to international level. For instance, The Incubator directly contributed to the National REDD proposal of Uganda, and is working to pilot a framework in Peru for nesting local project activity within national and subnational carbon accounting systems 

The Incubator provides early-stage ecosystem service projects with access to international legal guidance on complex issues such as contract design and tenure/ resource rights of landholders 

Through its technical expertise, the Incubator helps to design carbon finance mechanisms which also create opportunities in projects for improved biodiversity conservation, sustainable/ alternative use, and strengthened indigenous rights 

To support a group of ranchers and farmers in their commitment to environmental conservation, The Incubator is researching potential revenue streams from PES such as a sustainable brand for beef products, and carbon offset payments for Afforestation / Reforestation projects as well as REDD 

Networks between communities, private forest owners and local governments for collective development and implementation of forest management plans are an effective approach to reduce deforestation and degradation and market emission reductions on the landscape scale 

In an innovative community development project in Mexico, The Incubator is testing financial benefit sharing models by aggregating rural family landowners to access global carbon finance in exchange for small scale reforestation and restoration on degraded lands 

Incubator staff and partners can provide technical support to projects in the form of: feasibility assessments, site selection guidance, economic analysis of proposed projects, verification of carbon stocks based on CCB/ VCS standards, and investor identification and outreach 

The Incubator is working to test whether carbon finance for REDD+, by providing resources for improving productivity and ecological resilience, can shift the cocoa farming system in Ghana toward sustainability