GB-COH-08195029-CAPE Environmental Finance Limited, trading as Finance Earth Carbon markets, although nascent and imperfect, have emerged as a market-based solution for attracting private funding for climate mitigation. While flows are still modest and significant concerns remain over integrity in many projects, growth prospects are positive. Biodiversity, on the other hand, is much more complex than carbon, and so establishing nature markets and "internalising the externality" represents a much bigger challenge. In addition, project developers looking to develop nature-based solutions (NBSs) with carbon or biodiversity positive outcomes face many other challenges: high upfront costs, lack of transaction structuring and investor negotiation skills, varying investor requirements and legal/political risk with unclear property rights or regulation. As a consequence, there is currently limited investment in biodiversity focused projects. CAPE will identify and accelerate select projects which demonstrate the above synergies. The accelerator will provide both transaction advisory and technical project development support tailored to the specific needs of each project. When focused on the post-feasibility, pre-investment stage, it is envisaged this will create the demonstration cases to 'prime' the market. There is a significant gap in support for nature-focused projects that have established the feasibility of a solution, but who are finalising their design and commercial model. CAPE's focus will be on getting projects to first financial close. Projects chosen must be prospectively commercially viable and thus will be post-initial feasibility, with work ideally initiated on the carbon project design document (PDD - specifying the technical and operation detail of how the offsets will be produced) and on the benefit sharing agreement design process (BSA - defining community engagement and benefit distribution). Following the pilot, CAPE continues as CAPE 2.0 under a second FSD Africa grant (FSDA/G/DE/062/2026, March 2026 to March 2028). An amendment signed on 14 September 2026 brought FCDO Ethiopia funding into the programme. CAPE 2.0 provides project funding as a 0% returnable grant with a tiered success fee, so that funding recovered from projects that raise investment returns to the facility for reuse. Alongside project support, CAPE 2.0 covers pipeline identification across Africa, the Living Lab knowledge platform, portfolio and grant management, continued transaction advisory to the first cohort, and design work on an insurance platform and an offtake fund. Across the signed CAPE 1, CAPE Ethiopia and CAPE 2.0 grant agreements, committed funding totals £4,756,508, of which £3,505,000 (74%) is allocated to projects. To 30 September 2026, £733,654 (21% of project funding) has been disbursed to seven projects. The CAPE Pilot had three core objectives: 1. Primary: To demonstrate how commercial business cases for investing in NBS can be realised by getting at least one project to financial close; 2. To develop the collective understanding of how to enable high-integrity projects to come to market, drawing on CAPE’s direct experiences and exchanging learnings with investors and other market actors; 3. To develop follow-on phases for CAPE, drawing on lessons from the pilot and raising finance for scale-up. CAPE 2.0 extends this work to subsequent Pan-African cohorts and an Ethiopia cohort, and tests a recyclable funding model in which returnable grants are recovered through a success fee when supported projects raise investment. FINANCIAL SECTOR DEEPENING AFRICA Africa Nature Investors Foundation LTD/GTE Vlinder Austria GmbH EDEN PEOPLE + PLANET Pro Green Earth Limited Stiftung Menschen für Menschen – Karlheinz Böhms Äthiopienhilfe goodcarbon Gmbh World Vision Australia Global Communities Inc. (AfriScout) Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office £1,251,508 of £4,756,508 committed funds Finance Earth programme delivery, management and allowable expenses under the CAPE 1, CAPE Ethiopia and CAPE 2.0 non-returnable grants. Of £4,756,508 committed under the signed CAPE 1, CAPE Ethiopia and CAPE 2.0 grant agreements, £3,505,000 (74%) is allocated to projects in Africa. To 30 September 2026, £733,654 has been disbursed to seven projects in Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania, Kenya and Ethiopia: 21% of all project funding, and 52% of the £1,400,000 allocated to the CAPE 1 and CAPE Ethiopia projects. The £2,105,000 CAPE 2.0 returnable grant, of which £1,000,000 was received in May 2026, will be deployed once Cohort 2 projects are contracted. A further £1,700,000 of FCDO Ethiopia funding is scheduled for 2027 and 2028, subject to approval. The Carbon Accelerator Programme for the Environment (‘CAPE’) seeks to address the challenges of investment flow into projects addressing both climate change and biodiversity loss, by accelerating high integrity natural climate solutions. 1161273 2431197.52 1164037.48 56775.00 62152.5 57525.00 28188.75 200000 200000 30843 17850 37500.00 69030 3563 47073.08 1000000 437500 40456.70 49821.89 68975.66 6899.11 1500000 1105000 500000 500000 1489258 94076.72 161273 57000 100000