Financing for Nature: The Capital Exists. What's Missing Is the Political Will.
By Florence Ogola Fuchs
The world is not short of capital. It is short of the political courage to put nature at the centre of economic decisions.
Governments have promised to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, countries agreed to mobilise at least USD 200 billion a year for biodiversity by 2030, including at least USD 30 billion a year in international finance for developing countries. The commitments are clear. The budgets and incentives too often tell a different story.
It is like drawing up an ambitious annual budget and then refusing to fund the priorities you have written into it. Worse still, we keep financing activities that undermine those priorities.
Businesses rely on healthy forests, wetlands, oceans, soils and wildlife for water, raw materials, pollination and resilient supply chains. Yet too many business models treat nature as an endless source of inputs and a convenient place to leave the damage. That is a one-sided relationship, and it is becoming an expensive one.
Nature finance is growing. So is the contradiction.
We should acknowledge the progress. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) October 2026 assessment estimates that global biodiversity finance from public and private sources averaged approximately USD 74.9 - 92.4 billion a year across available data for 2023-2025. International public biodiversity finance also increased by 94% between the 2018-2020 and 2023 - 2024 annual averages, using the OECD's consistent attribution method.
Funding for activities where biodiversity is the principal objective rose by 85%, from an annual average of USD 3.9 billion to USD 7.2 billion over those same periods. Nature is gaining a stronger place in development finance. That matters.
But the details matter just as much. Biodiversity-specific finance funds activities where nature protection is the main objective. Broader biodiversity-related finance can also include agriculture, water, infrastructure or climate programmes in which biodiversity plays a significant role. Integrating nature into these sectors is welcome, but attaching a biodiversity label does not automatically deliver a biodiversity outcome. We must ask what changes on the ground, who benefits and how results are measured.
Private capital is beginning to move, too. According to the OECD, private finance mobilised through official development finance interventions targeting biodiversity rose from an average of about USD 0.2 billion a year in 2018-2020 to USD 1.6 billion in 2023-2024. That is genuine growth, but it remains modest compared with the scale of the task. Important to note is that these figures cover finance mobilized by development interventions, not all private biodiversity investment.
We finance damage on a far greater scale than protection
Here is the contradiction we cannot afford to ignore. UNEP's State of Finance for Nature 2026 reports that, in 2023, approximately USD 7.3 trillion flowed into activities harmful to nature. It identifies about USD 4.9 trillion in nature-negative private finance and USD 2.4 trillion in environmentally harmful public subsidies. In the same year, investment in nature-based solutions reached only USD 220 billion.
These figures do not measure exactly the same categories as the OECD's biodiversity finance estimates. But they expose the direction of our financial system: for every dollar supporting nature-based solutions, more than USD 30 flowed towards activities damaging nature.
So the challenge is not simply to make conservation more attractive to investors. Governments must also stop rewarding the destruction of the ecosystems on which economies depend. Reforming harmful subsidies and changing investment incentives could make as much difference as launching another nature fund.
Political choices have real consequences
The United Kingdom offers a clear example of the tension between environmental promises and competing spending priorities. In May 2026, the UK reduced its pledge to the Green Climate Fund for 2024-2027 from GBP 1.62 billion to GBP 815 million. The reduction came as the government pursued a wider cut in overseas aid, from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income by 2027-2028, to help finance higher defence and security spending.
Not every pound withdrawn from climate finance can be traced directly to a defence purchase, and climate finance is not identical to biodiversity finance. But the choice still matters. When governments reduce support for climate resilience and nature while keeping their international commitments on paper, they shift the costs and risks onto countries and communities least equipped to absorb them, the least developed countries.
National security is a legitimate public responsibility. So is the security that comes from functioning food systems, reliable water supplies and ecosystems that protect communities from floods and droughts. Policymakers should not treat one as real security and the other as optional.
Biodiversity importance is not the same as bankability
Who receives the money, and in what form, is as important as the headline total. OECD analysis of multilateral biodiversity-related development finance for 2015-2022 found that upper-middle-income countries received about half of these flows. That is not necessarily misplaced: many of these countries contain globally important forests, oceans and biodiversity hotspots.
But the pattern raises a hard question. Are we directing finance towards the greatest ecological and social needs, or mainly towards places where investors and lenders can find projects that fit their requirements? Lower-income countries may depend heavily on ecosystems for food, water, incomes and resilience while struggling to prepare projects that meet international financing standards.
Financing terms also shape the outcome. In the same OECD analysis, around 70% of multilateral biodiversity-related finance took the form of loans, while bilateral donors provided about 68% of their financing as grants. These figures cover different provider groups over 2015-2022, not a universal rule for every nature project. Still, they underline why grants, concessional finance and carefully designed risk-sharing instruments matter. Not every ecosystem can generate the cash flow needed to repay a loan, and not every vulnerable country can responsibly absorb more debt.
Nature loss is an economic risk, not a side issue
Nature supports businesses even when they cannot see that dependence on their balance sheets. Farmers need fertile soils and pollinators. Manufacturers need dependable water and raw materials. Pharmaceutical companies draw on biological resources and research. Banks and retailers can face nature-related risks through the businesses, places and supply chains they finance or rely on.
Companies also put pressure on ecosystems through land-use change, resource extraction, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and the spread of invasive species. Agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining, construction and energy can have particularly direct impacts, but the risks do not stop at the factory gate or farm boundary.
When soils degrade, water becomes scarce or floods interrupt production, the consequences can spread through supply chains, public budgets and financial institutions. Biodiversity loss can therefore become a broader economic risk. The sooner governments recognise that connection, the less costly the response is likely to be.
Africa cannot scale nature finance through scattered projects
A deeper problem lies in how governments and funders organise the work. Environment ministries are often expected to protect ecosystems, while finance, agriculture, infrastructure and energy ministries make decisions that determine whether those ecosystems survive. Donors, development banks, charities and investors then arrive with different mandates, application procedures and reporting requirements.
For African governments and local organisations, this can mean spending too much time pursuing and managing separate funding streams and too little time delivering lasting results. Short project cycles can also make it difficult to protect whole landscapes and ecosystems that require investment over decades.
Consider the Congo Basin, home to the world's second-largest tropical rainforest. Its conservation and sustainable development demand regional cooperation, locally grounded economic opportunities and financing that lasts. A 2025 initiative launched by UNEP, the UN Capital Development Fund and the Central African Forest Initiative committed an initial USD 15 million to help catalyse up to USD 30 million for nature-positive businesses in the region. Such partnerships are valuable. They also show why project-level innovation must sit within a bigger, coordinated investment strategy.
The same principle applies to mangrove restoration, sustainable agriculture and watershed protection across Africa. A restored mangrove can protect coastlines, support fisheries, store carbon and strengthen livelihoods. Funding each benefit through a different short-term programme makes little sense when communities need a coherent, long-term approach.
What real leadership on nature finance would look like
First, governments must treat nature as economic infrastructure. Finance and planning ministries should incorporate ecosystem protection into budgets, development plans, procurement and public investment decisions, not leave the responsibility solely to environment ministries. Healthy ecosystems support agriculture, tourism, water security and climate resilience. They deserve the same serious economic scrutiny as roads and power systems.
Second, governments and development partners should align climate, biodiversity and development finance around shared outcomes. A programme that restores degraded land, improves farm productivity and secures a watershed should not have to navigate three disconnected financing systems to deliver those benefits.
Third, countries should strengthen national nature finance platforms that bring public agencies, development banks, investors, researchers, civil society and communities around agreed priorities. The aim must be coordination, not another layer of bureaucracy. Clear rules, transparent reporting and shared investment pipelines can reduce duplication and make finance easier to access.
Fourth, public institutions should help prepare credible projects and use grants, technical assistance and risk-sharing where appropriate. That can attract responsible private investment into sustainable forestry, restoration and the blue economy. But we should not pretend that every conservation activity must earn a commercial return. Some public goods require public funding, and financial structures must protect ecological integrity and community rights.
Finally, African institutions, Indigenous Peoples and local communities must help decide where money goes. People who live with, manage and depend on these ecosystems should receive meaningful decision-making power, fair benefits and practical access to finance. Nature finance that excludes them may move money, but it is less likely to deliver justice or lasting protection.
The money exists in the global economy. Turning it into real protection will require political choices that redirect harmful finance, reward stewardship and put nature into the heart of development. The world does not need another declaration that nature matters. It needs budgets that prove it. We must put finances where it matters most, nature.
By Florence Ogola Fuchs
The world is not short of capital. It is short of the political courage to put nature at the centre of economic decisions.
Governments have promised to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, countries agreed to mobilise at least USD 200 billion a year for biodiversity by 2030, including at least USD 30 billion a year in international finance for developing countries. The commitments are clear. The budgets and incentives too often tell a different story.
It is like drawing up an ambitious annual budget and then refusing to fund the priorities you have written into it. Worse still, we keep financing activities that undermine those priorities.
Businesses rely on healthy forests, wetlands, oceans, soils and wildlife for water, raw materials, pollination and resilient supply chains. Yet too many business models treat nature as an endless source of inputs and a convenient place to leave the damage. That is a one-sided relationship, and it is becoming an expensive one.
Nature finance is growing. So is the contradiction.
We should acknowledge the progress. The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) October 2026 assessment estimates that global biodiversity finance from public and private sources averaged approximately USD 74.9 - 92.4 billion a year across available data for 2023-2025. International public biodiversity finance also increased by 94% between the 2018-2020 and 2023 - 2024 annual averages, using the OECD's consistent attribution method.
Funding for activities where biodiversity is the principal objective rose by 85%, from an annual average of USD 3.9 billion to USD 7.2 billion over those same periods. Nature is gaining a stronger place in development finance. That matters.
But the details matter just as much. Biodiversity-specific finance funds activities where nature protection is the main objective. Broader biodiversity-related finance can also include agriculture, water, infrastructure or climate programmes in which biodiversity plays a significant role. Integrating nature into these sectors is welcome, but attaching a biodiversity label does not automatically deliver a biodiversity outcome. We must ask what changes on the ground, who benefits and how results are measured.
Private capital is beginning to move, too. According to the OECD, private finance mobilised through official development finance interventions targeting biodiversity rose from an average of about USD 0.2 billion a year in 2018-2020 to USD 1.6 billion in 2023-2024. That is genuine growth, but it remains modest compared with the scale of the task. Important to note is that these figures cover finance mobilized by development interventions, not all private biodiversity investment.
We finance damage on a far greater scale than protection
Here is the contradiction we cannot afford to ignore. UNEP's State of Finance for Nature 2026 reports that, in 2023, approximately USD 7.3 trillion flowed into activities harmful to nature. It identifies about USD 4.9 trillion in nature-negative private finance and USD 2.4 trillion in environmentally harmful public subsidies. In the same year, investment in nature-based solutions reached only USD 220 billion.
These figures do not measure exactly the same categories as the OECD's biodiversity finance estimates. But they expose the direction of our financial system: for every dollar supporting nature-based solutions, more than USD 30 flowed towards activities damaging nature.
So the challenge is not simply to make conservation more attractive to investors. Governments must also stop rewarding the destruction of the ecosystems on which economies depend. Reforming harmful subsidies and changing investment incentives could make as much difference as launching another nature fund.
Political choices have real consequences
The United Kingdom offers a clear example of the tension between environmental promises and competing spending priorities. In May 2026, the UK reduced its pledge to the Green Climate Fund for 2024-2027 from GBP 1.62 billion to GBP 815 million. The reduction came as the government pursued a wider cut in overseas aid, from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income by 2027-2028, to help finance higher defence and security spending.
Not every pound withdrawn from climate finance can be traced directly to a defence purchase, and climate finance is not identical to biodiversity finance. But the choice still matters. When governments reduce support for climate resilience and nature while keeping their international commitments on paper, they shift the costs and risks onto countries and communities least equipped to absorb them, the least developed countries.
National security is a legitimate public responsibility. So is the security that comes from functioning food systems, reliable water supplies and ecosystems that protect communities from floods and droughts. Policymakers should not treat one as real security and the other as optional.
Biodiversity importance is not the same as bankability
Who receives the money, and in what form, is as important as the headline total. OECD analysis of multilateral biodiversity-related development finance for 2015-2022 found that upper-middle-income countries received about half of these flows. That is not necessarily misplaced: many of these countries contain globally important forests, oceans and biodiversity hotspots.
But the pattern raises a hard question. Are we directing finance towards the greatest ecological and social needs, or mainly towards places where investors and lenders can find projects that fit their requirements? Lower-income countries may depend heavily on ecosystems for food, water, incomes and resilience while struggling to prepare projects that meet international financing standards.
Financing terms also shape the outcome. In the same OECD analysis, around 70% of multilateral biodiversity-related finance took the form of loans, while bilateral donors provided about 68% of their financing as grants. These figures cover different provider groups over 2015-2022, not a universal rule for every nature project. Still, they underline why grants, concessional finance and carefully designed risk-sharing instruments matter. Not every ecosystem can generate the cash flow needed to repay a loan, and not every vulnerable country can responsibly absorb more debt.
Nature loss is an economic risk, not a side issue
Nature supports businesses even when they cannot see that dependence on their balance sheets. Farmers need fertile soils and pollinators. Manufacturers need dependable water and raw materials. Pharmaceutical companies draw on biological resources and research. Banks and retailers can face nature-related risks through the businesses, places and supply chains they finance or rely on.
Companies also put pressure on ecosystems through land-use change, resource extraction, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions and the spread of invasive species. Agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining, construction and energy can have particularly direct impacts, but the risks do not stop at the factory gate or farm boundary.
When soils degrade, water becomes scarce or floods interrupt production, the consequences can spread through supply chains, public budgets and financial institutions. Biodiversity loss can therefore become a broader economic risk. The sooner governments recognise that connection, the less costly the response is likely to be.
Africa cannot scale nature finance through scattered projects
A deeper problem lies in how governments and funders organise the work. Environment ministries are often expected to protect ecosystems, while finance, agriculture, infrastructure and energy ministries make decisions that determine whether those ecosystems survive. Donors, development banks, charities and investors then arrive with different mandates, application procedures and reporting requirements.
For African governments and local organisations, this can mean spending too much time pursuing and managing separate funding streams and too little time delivering lasting results. Short project cycles can also make it difficult to protect whole landscapes and ecosystems that require investment over decades.
Consider the Congo Basin, home to the world's second-largest tropical rainforest. Its conservation and sustainable development demand regional cooperation, locally grounded economic opportunities and financing that lasts. A 2025 initiative launched by UNEP, the UN Capital Development Fund and the Central African Forest Initiative committed an initial USD 15 million to help catalyse up to USD 30 million for nature-positive businesses in the region. Such partnerships are valuable. They also show why project-level innovation must sit within a bigger, coordinated investment strategy.
The same principle applies to mangrove restoration, sustainable agriculture and watershed protection across Africa. A restored mangrove can protect coastlines, support fisheries, store carbon and strengthen livelihoods. Funding each benefit through a different short-term programme makes little sense when communities need a coherent, long-term approach.
What real leadership on nature finance would look like
First, governments must treat nature as economic infrastructure. Finance and planning ministries should incorporate ecosystem protection into budgets, development plans, procurement and public investment decisions, not leave the responsibility solely to environment ministries. Healthy ecosystems support agriculture, tourism, water security and climate resilience. They deserve the same serious economic scrutiny as roads and power systems.
Second, governments and development partners should align climate, biodiversity and development finance around shared outcomes. A programme that restores degraded land, improves farm productivity and secures a watershed should not have to navigate three disconnected financing systems to deliver those benefits.
Third, countries should strengthen national nature finance platforms that bring public agencies, development banks, investors, researchers, civil society and communities around agreed priorities. The aim must be coordination, not another layer of bureaucracy. Clear rules, transparent reporting and shared investment pipelines can reduce duplication and make finance easier to access.
Fourth, public institutions should help prepare credible projects and use grants, technical assistance and risk-sharing where appropriate. That can attract responsible private investment into sustainable forestry, restoration and the blue economy. But we should not pretend that every conservation activity must earn a commercial return. Some public goods require public funding, and financial structures must protect ecological integrity and community rights.
Finally, African institutions, Indigenous Peoples and local communities must help decide where money goes. People who live with, manage and depend on these ecosystems should receive meaningful decision-making power, fair benefits and practical access to finance. Nature finance that excludes them may move money, but it is less likely to deliver justice or lasting protection.
The money exists in the global economy. Turning it into real protection will require political choices that redirect harmful finance, reward stewardship and put nature into the heart of development. The world does not need another declaration that nature matters. It needs budgets that prove it. We must put finances where it matters most, nature.
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