4Futures Lab 2026 Mongolia
The Parachute Program
Restoring Land by Restoring Livelihoods
Restore the pastures and you restore the livelihoods — the people we train become the workforce that delivers clean heat, and wellbeing accounting pulls finance back to the land. The program initiated and co-created during together with ESCP Business students over the 2026 academic year to April and presented at a Mongolia stakeholder dialogue, including the Trade and Development Bank of Mongolia.
UNCCD COP17 · Ulaanbaatar · 17–28 August 2026 · “Restoring Land. Restoring Hope.”
THE MOMENT
A “Land COP” with a finance problem
Restoration is chronically underfunded because degradation looks
54%
of the world’s land surface is rangeland
500M+
people depend on rangelands for their livelihoods
≈ ½
of rangelands show declining productivity — yet receive a fraction of climate finance
WHY MONGOLIA, WHY NOW
Mongolia holds the COP17 presidency into 2028. The GEF-funded, IUCN-implemented Mongolia COP17 Legacy Project (~$12.65M) provides an important existing context for rangeland restoration and investment. Pillar 3 proposes a Common Good accounting framework designed to make the value of healthy land more visible, for local co-design and validation.
MONGOLIA
Five crises, one self-reinforcing trap
Land degradation & dzud
Migration to ger districts
Coal heating
Toxic air & ill health
No pathways, low investment
↺ the trap deepens
The lesson from that $400M investment experience is that capital alone does not create scale. What is missing is delivery architecture: who installs, who is trained, who is accountable, and how you prove the money changed lives.
$400M
spent, no scale
77%
land degraded
200,000
UB households burn coal
687 µg/m³
PM2.5 peak — 45× WHO
3 . 5 ×
winter fetal mortality
THE IDEA IN ONE LOOP
Measure → Train → Deliver → Account
Measure where the trap is deepest → train from those communities → let them deliver the transition → account for it so finance follows.
Measure
Indicators show which ger-district households need clean heat and which rural soums are emptying — targeting place and investment.
1
Train
We recruit from those same communities — ger-district youth and coal-linked workers, 50% women.
2
Deliver
Trained crews would staff proposed neighbourhood clean-heat companies (CESCOs), with the model designed for potential scale to 50,000+ homes.
3
Account
Wellbeing and land value are measured — so capital keeps flowing on verified results. The loop closes.
4
TVET is the hinge — it turns a diagnosis into delivered warmth and paid work.
PILLAR 1 - FUTURE OF WORK & TALENT
TVET as the engine of jobs
Proposed outcome-linked vocational training where funding is tied to employment, not enrolment — at an indicative cost of roughly $300–1,200 per trainee.
WHO WE TRAIN - TWO COHORTS
Urban low-income youth · 18–25
Informal or unstable work, no certified qualification, from migrant former-herder households.
Coal-linked heating workers · 25–45
The informal heating sector whose income the transition threatens — the transition workforce.
WHAT THEY TRAIN IN
Green Construction · 3 months — insulation, clean-heat installation, smart meters (the workforce for Pillar 2).
.
Urban Green Services · 6 weeks — recycling, sanitation, circular micro-business.
.
Digital & Remote · 8 weeks — AI & digital tools, remote freelancing.
40%
35%
25%
HOW THEY'RE RECRUITED
Through TVET centres, community “Learning Ecosystem” hubs and the Female Futures Lab. Intake designed for 50% women and 30% coal workers, with an initial working model of 500 trainees across 2 ger districts and a potential pathway towards 1,200 trainees per year. Illustrative outcome assumptions include 80% completion and 65% employment within six months, for local co-design and validation.
Three ways the training pays society back
Turns a cost into jobs
The health and climate damage of coal smoke could become local, paid green work through insulation crews and clean heat installers.
1
A genuinely just transition
Coal linked workers whose livelihoods the transition may affect could be retrained to build its replacement.
2
Closes the gender & youth gap
Women are ~40% of STEM graduates but only ~10% of energy jobs. The proposed model is designed to use the Female Futures Lab and Learning Ecosystems to support access for women and ger-district youth through recognised credentials.
3
Diaspora as infrastructure: 220,000 Mongolians abroad, with 70%+ university educated, could be engaged as structured mentors, supporting brain circulation rather than brain drain
Proposed financing architecture for the training
A blended finance vehicle, the Just Transition Skills Fund, is designed to remove upfront costs for trainees while allowing different investors to take different levels of risk for different potential returns.
Indicative capital structure for discussion and local validation:
20% 40% 40%
First-loss / grants
-
Public
-
Philanthropy
— absorbs early losses
Concessional debt
Development banks — below-market rates
Senior impact capital
Potential impact investor return: 6–8%, subject to investment structuring and validation.
The proposed structure could be repaid through three mechanisms: employer co financing when a graduate is hired; Income Share Agreements, potentially set at 5–8% of income for 36 months and capped at 1.5× cost, with payments paused below a living wage; and municipal service contracts. The proposed Clean Heat Transition Facility is designed to explore blended financing, with an indicative scenario of approximately $4 of private capital for every $1 of public capital, subject to investor and institutional validation.
PILLAR 2 - CLEAN HEAT & JUST ENERGY
Clean heat — where the jobs go
Community Energy Service Companies
Proposed neighbourhood entities serving 500–1,000 households.
The household pays a monthly service fee at or below its coal spend. The CESCO carries the finance. No new household debt.
Clean Heat as a Service
Electric thermal storage + insulation, designed for off-peak charging at night.
At indicative full scale, a 200,000-unit fleet could provide ~400 MW of flexible grid capacity.
The link back to Pillar 1: The proposed CESCO model needs local installers and maintainers — an estimated 500–750 potential jobs across up to 50 CESCOs — matching the workforce the green-construction track produces.
Indicative pilot · €50M · ~20,000 households → potential ~$65M/year revenue at scale
PILLAR 3 - BEYOND-GDP DASHBOARDS
Two kinds of measurement
1 · Proposed Finance-eady Indicators
Designed to diagnose the inequality trap and target action — who needs clean heat, where migration is coming from, where to invest.
-
ΔG 0.064 · urban–rural gap
-
GPI_ger · negative
-
RDPI · displacement
-
GPTS <40 · subsidy target
-
RPII · rural-voice deficit
2 · Proposed Common Good Index
Designed from the Genuine Progress Index. It puts a value on what healthy land and pastures give people — clean air, water, livelihoods, wellbeing — to help pull investment toward restoration.
THE HONEST FRONTIER
Today there are no tangible, quantified numbers linking healthy land to quality of life and economic value — so restoration keeps losing to things that are easy to price. Producing those numbers is what this index is designed to do.
From land value to investment
A Common Good dashboard is designed to make visible what markets ignore — the carbon that healthy rangelands capture and store, and the wellbeing they protect. That visibility can help turn restoration into an investable asset.
Healthy rangeland
Measured carbon + wellbeing value
Article 6 & nature-based credits
Investment flows back to the land
The carbon market is opening
At COP30 (Belém, November 2025), 195 Parties adopted the 59 Belém Adaptation Indicators under the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA, Article 7 of the Paris Agreement) — the first time the international community agreed on a standardised set of metrics to measure adaptation progress. Developed through the UAE–Belém work programme (2023–2025), the indicators are voluntary and span water, food, health, ecosystems, infrastructure, and livelihoods. Further refinement is underway through the Belém-Addis Vision process (2025–2027). (Source: UNFCCC, COP30 Belém Package, 22 November 2025; Lancet Planetary Health, December 2025)
What the dashboard unlocks
Quantify the carbon a restored pasture holds and the quality of life it supports, giving rangeland investment pipelines the numbers investors need — connecting herder livelihoods directly to climate finance.
PROOF OF METHOD - IN TESTING
From Genuine Progress Index, applied in Bhutan for the Gross National Happiness Index
A Common Good dashboard is currently being tested on Tempelhofer Feld — scoring the value of keeping Berlin’s great open field against the construction projects proposed for it, in both a policy view and a citizen view. It is a working prototype for the land-value dashboard that could be adapted to Mongolia’s rangelands.
Policy view — score, five sectors, scenario comparison, 2025–2050 trajectory.
Citizen view — plain-language verdicts on what each decision means for a neighbourhood.
Being tested now — on a real, contested land decision, with potential adaptation to Mongolia’s rangelands.
GWI score · 72
Ecology
Social
Time
Economic
Governance
Prototype of the Common Good Index dashboard, currently in testing.
WHY IT BELONGS AT COP17
One problem, and the pieces that solve it
It’s the Land COP’s core problem
COP17 is about land — and its hardest question is that restoration is underfunded because degradation looks free.
We supply the two missing pieces
A workforce for restoration and clean heat, and an accounting framework designed to make the value of healthy land bankable.
It connect to money already moving
Designed to complement Mongolia’s existing rangeland investment efforts — including the COP17 Legacy Project — and connect with Article 6 carbon markets.
THREE ASKS, BEFORE COP17 OPENS
-
Mongolia's development coordination architecture — a co-design sprint on outcome-linked disbursement & the CGI as shared KPIs.
-
Mongolia's public and development finance institutions — a Clean Heat Transition Facility scoping table.
-
Legacy Project / IUCN — explore the CGI as an avoided-cost & carbon account for future rangeland pipelines.
“Everything is at our fingertips. We just need to playfully and courageously assemble it — with a value-oriented systems mindset.
— Marc Leberecht-Schneider
Project Contacts
CEO & Programme Designer, Generation iTrust
