The long-term solution to conserving Sri Lanka’s globally important biodiversity in the Wet Zone, necessitates a holistic approach wherein, the Global Environment Facility funded project, “Partnerships and Innovative Financing to Mainstream Biodiversity and Sustainable Land Management in the Wet Climatic Zone of Sri Lanka”, implemented by the Ministry of Environment will support to integrate biodiversity conservation, sustainable land, and environmental management practices within the private sector tea and rubber plantations in the Wet Zone with the intent to conserve the high biodiversity value remnant forests within and improve market share for sustainably produced tea and rubber in the international consumer markets.

To achieve this objective, the project aims to support biophysical, biodiversity, land degradation, and social assessments and provide technical guidance to promote alternate and ethical business models for tea and rubber plantations through partnerships between the public sector, private sector (mainly the plantation sector), smallholder groups and local communities, including estate labour. The project will aim to harness innovative private sector financing and will be focused on the following principles:

• Promoting a holistic and integrated plantation management model (including sustainable production, biodiversity conservation and social responsibility) that meets the industry’s market needs and achieve conservation targets of the project. This is to facilitate the maintenance of biological and ecological integrity of the remnant forests and riparian corridors, as well as for watershed protection. This conservation activity should directly lend itself to industry sustainability goals and promote and ensure locally grown products have a competitive edge in the global consumer market(s).

• Developing and strengthening private sector led but collaborative partnerships with public sector and community organizations to support efforts to integrate conservation, sustainable land and forest resource management, climate risk management, social responsibility, and diversified and alternative environmentally friendly economic models to tea and rubber plantation sector and smallholders. 

• Strengthening capacities and knowledge within the private sector, communities, provincial, district, and local government institutions, community-based organizations, and non-governmental organizations and increasing their potential to promote sustainable plantation practices, agriculture and natural resource management, climate risk management, and biodiversity conservation in the productive landscapes.

• Ensuring that the development and implementation of this project mainstreams gender and social/cultural safeguards and ensures that the project contributes to equality and equity, through the creation of equitable opportunities and benefits for both women and men.

• Ensuring an adaptive management approach that progressively identifies and addresses threats to biodiversity and natural resources and associated challenges, including those related to ecological, demographical, social, climatic, market, technological and economic factors in the biological corridors.

• Being selective in terms of identification of regional plantation companies (RPCs), investment locations and nature of interventions to serve as demonstration models in the plantation sector and in addressing the nature of challenges that operate therein taking into considerations the existing institutional capacity and resource constraints; and

• Addressing underlying policy discordance between improving plantation productivity and production, and biodiversity conservation; between watershed and forest conservation in the plantations and its economic functions; between the high demand for fuelwood for tea and rubber processing and the community and preventing forest degradation.