3.5 Corporate coalitions improve market access to viable mangrove-positive investments Corporations can work with their peers to enable better action for each other and access viable mangrove-positive investment opportunities. Internally, corporations have opportunities to tailor their due diligence methods to the principles outlined in this Playbook, as well as those outlined in the World Bank’s Blue Carbon Readiness Framework.116 To enable broader action, corporations can band together to shape best practices for specified engagement activities and, in the process, promote transparency and integrity by holding each other accountable. For example, 1t.org Corporate Alliance members commit to inspire and engage their peers to action and share lessons learned, engaging in dialogues for forest-positive action and pioneering approaches. Through community-centric buyers’ clubs, corporations can encourage community leadership. Such clubs can lead with the principle of “branded differentiation”, whereby the uniquely social and sustainable aspects of each product are actively marketed to the consumer, to reflect the value added by community leadership in the production process. SourceUp, an online platform that connects buyers and other stakeholders in agri-commodity supply chains with landscape and jurisdictional initiatives in production areas,117 is an example of a platform that supports branded differentiation of sustainable solutions in a scalable manner that could be applied to mangrove-positive agriculture. The Business Alliance for Scaling Climate Solutions (BASCS) is a global platform of climate solutions funders, project developers and other solution providers, together with NGO partners. BASCS focuses on building the capabilities of companies to enter the voluntary carbon market (VCM), connecting stakeholders to increase the volume, scale and impact of business investment in climate solutions and educate companies accordingly.118 For projects that don’t yet meet qualifications for full engagement, corporations can help them transition to high quality while embedding proper safeguard guidance. The High-Quality Blue Carbon Practitioners Guide is a helpful tool for projects to measure their increasing quality as it links funder and market definitions of high-quality project development and financing with sets of activities that can be integrated into project design and management in the field. Although written primarily for carbon crediting projects, the guide can be used with any blue carbon project and provides a library of more than 50 curated resources to encourage high-quality blue carbon ecosystem interventions that suit different project contexts and blue carbon ecosystems.119 CASE STUDY 6 Symbiosis Coalition – a corporate platform to advance market commitment Symbiosis Coalition was created by Google, Meta, Microsoft and Salesforce as an advance market commitment of up to 20 million tonnes of CO2e to invest in the next generation of nature-based carbon removals projects by 2030, driving positive outcomes for people and planet. Coalition members aim to partner with like-minded investors, NGOs, market standard setters and project developers to clarify the bar for what “good” restoration looks like and enable project establishment. Symbiosis Quality Pillars guide the development of project- specific criteria and include conservative accounting, durability, social & community benefits, transparency and ecological integrity. The pillars build on existing standards and, at minimum, align with the Core Carbon Principles (CCPs) of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market (ICVCM). Symbiosis Quality Criteria aim to strike the balance between being specific enough to be actionable but flexible enough to allow for innovation and consideration of project-specific contexts. Partners: Corporations: Google, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce Corporations can band together to shape best practices for specified engagement activities. Source: Symbiosis Coalition.120 Investing in Mangroves: The Corporate Playbook 32

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