Financing Nature: Closing the Global Biodiversity Financing Gap

To slow and stop the global loss of biodiversity, we must fundamentally rethink our relationship with nature and transform our economic models and market systems. The policy and economic actions needed to achieve this require considerable political will, broad public support, and substantial investment.

The Financing Nature report addresses two important challenges. First, the report lays out the broad economic case for protecting nature, including an examination of the many known economic and social values of biodiversity, while recognizing that the complexities and interdependencies of nature mean that attempted economic valuations will almost certainly be partial and underestimates. Second, the report focuses on a critical element related to protecting biodiversity, namely the biodiversity financing gap between the current total annual capital flows toward global biodiversity conservation and the total amount of funds needed to sustainably manage biodiversity and maintain ecosystems integrity. Having gauged this biodiversity financing gap, the report identifies a set of nine financial and policy mechanisms that, if implemented and scaled up, can collectively close this gap.

The immediate intent of this report is to inform the work of national delegations and other negotiators in developing the resource mobilization strategy for the Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework that will be agreed to at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2021. The longer-term intent is to help political leaders, country finance ministries, international institutions, and representatives of companies, NGOs, and private philanthropy to better understand the economic case for biodiversity conservation and to accelerate the transformation of national economic models to those that appropriately value nature.

The report provides four central insights:

• Closing the gap relies heavily upon government actions.
• The private sector can play a pivotal role, but governments need to pave the way. Governments need to put in place the right regulatory environment, smart incentives and market structures to catalyze financial flows from the private sector into biodiversity conservation.
• The only way to stop global biodiversity loss is to ensure that nature is appropriately valued in all economies
• The gap between the amount currently spent on biodiversity conservation and what is needed is large, but it can be closed.