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Innovative financing models are emerging globally to advance nature-based solutions (NBS) that can cost-effectively enhance infrastructure performance, meet Sustainable Development Goals, and mitigate the negative impacts of climate change. Despite the potential for NBS to generate attractive returns and provide significant cost-savings, these financing models remain underutilized. Consequently, NBS are not achieving their full potential and a tranche of pent up green capital is sidelined. This report highlights five proven NBS financing strategies that leverage private finance: green bonds, blended market-rate and concessional loans, land-based financing strategies, insurance policies, and endowments. This report also outlines current barriers to the successful scaling of these financing strategies in Latin America and the Caribbean and identifies the approaches and enabling conditions needed to overcome them.

In multisensor target tracking systems measurements from different sensors on the same target exhibit, typically, biases. These biases can be accounted for as fixed random variables by the Schmidt-Kalman filter. Furthermore, measurements from the same target can arrive out of sequence. This “out-of-sequence” measurement (OOSM) problem was recently solved and a procedure for updating the state with a multistep-lag measurement using the simpler “1-step-lag” algorithm was developed for the situation without measurement biases. The present work presents the solution to the combined problem of handling biases from multiple sensors when their measurements arrive out of sequence.

We present our experience with the design and teaching of a graduate-level networking hardware course in which students design and build an Internet router. Each team of two students (one proficient in hardware and one proficient in software) design and develop a fully functional router that routes live Internet traffic and inter-operates with other students' routers via a simple routing protocol. Hardware is designed in Verilog using an industry-standard design flow on a specially designed platform, called NetFPGA. Software is written in user-space using a high-level language. Software and hardware are combined and tested using real network traffic over arbitrary private topologies using a custom tool, called VNS. Our approach is distinguished in that both hardware and software can be designed, tested and deployed remotely over the Internet. Our goal is to give students experience in the design of complex networking systems. In our initial course offering in Spring 2004, all teams successfully implemented fully functional routers in less than ten weeks. We will pilot courses outside of Stanford using the remote teaching infrastructure presented in this paper.