Insurance giant AXA XL, Enosis Capital seal 'debt-for-nature' tie up

By Marc Jones LONDON, Jan 27 (Reuters) - Credit fund Enosis Capital has sealed an agreement with AXA XL for the insurance giant to provide crucial cover for a new $3 billion wave of ‘debt-for-nature’ deals, the first of which is expected in the next six to nine months. Debt-for-nature swaps aim to help poorer countries spend more on under-threat ecosystems such as coral reefs or rainforests by replacing costly government bonds with cheaper alternatives. Examples in Belize, Barbados and Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands have grown their popularity, but there has been a relative drought over the last year as climate-change sceptic Donald Trump’s return as president in the U.S. has led to changes at some of the key institutions involved. With countries still keen to utilise debt swaps, however, specialist finance and insurance firms are now stepping in, something that has always been seen as necessary for the debt-for-nature swap market to take off. “The view is that we need to have more private sector participating in these deals,” said Ramzi Issa, who co-founded Enosis Capital in late 2024 after years pioneering debt-for-nature-swap structuring at investment bank Credit Suisse. He said the tie-up with AXA XL to provide political risk and other similar insurance was key to that, and part of Enosis’s $3 billion pipeline of debt swaps and development deals it hopes to carry out over the next four years. Issa expects the first of those dozen-or-more deals to be finalised in the next six to nine months, with a second before the end of the year. “There is quite a lot of interest in this space,” Issa told Reuters, declining to name the countries involved due to the debt market sensitivities. He said the first deal would not be a traditional debt swap structure, but would use many of the same “credit enhancements” such as risk insurance that are vital to keeping borrowing costs as low as possible for countries. SPEED UP THE PROCESS The tie-up is also part of a broader collaboration with the ‘Debt For Nature Coalition’, which includes Conservation International, the World Wildlife Fund, and Hollywood star Leonardo DiCaprio’s Re:wild group. AXA XL’s Jeff Abramson and Stuart Barrowcliff said debt swaps were an area of growth for the insurance firm. It has underwritten a number of the swaps that have been carried out over the last decade and was heavily involved in one of the most recent in the Bahamas in late 2024, where it insured $30 million of the $300 million loan at the centre of it. Abramson said the hope was the tie-up would help reduce some of the complexities inherent in debt swaps that can mean they take years to agree and finalise. “These deals do tend to have quite a long gestation period,” Abramson said. “The hope is that we can make this more systematic… to make the crank turn a little faster.”