Report: The Elephants in the Room Driving Biodiversity Destruction

Partnership of civil society groups say governments at COP17 Biodiversity Conference are ignoring the real drivers of biodiversity loss rooted in inequitable global economic systems and rules, while trillions continue to finance ecosystem destruction.

As governments begin to gather in Armenia for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP17 and the first global review of progress toward the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a new report, produced by Third World Network, Friends of the Earth International and Rainforest Action Network, in collaboration with the Global Youth Biodiversity Network and the CBD Women’s Caucus, argues that negotiators are failing to confront the financial and economic systems driving biodiversity destruction.

The report, We Need to Talk About the Elephants in the Room (And Why Ignoring Them Perpetuates Biodiversity Destruction), contends that efforts to halt biodiversity loss will continue to fall short unless governments move beyond debates about mobilizing more conservation finance and begin tackling the structural forces that continue to reward environmental destruction.

The report identifies four “elephants in the room”: an international financial architecture that pressures governments toward extractive development; trillions of dollars in harmful public and private financial flows; legal systems that prioritize investor protections over environmental regulation; and growing reliance on market-oriented biodiversity finance mechanisms that often fail to address the underlying causes of biodiversity loss.

The report comes as governments conduct the first formal review of implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in Montreal in 2022 with the mission of halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030. The review is taking place amid serious concerns about finance, equity, rights and accountability, alongside the growing influence of business, private finance and market instruments in biodiversity policy.

The report examines the systems beneath these debates, including the dependence of economies and financial stability on destructive activity, the public and private finance that sustains it, legal rules that privilege corporate rights, and market responses that repeat past failures. UNEP estimates that harmful public and private financial flows reached US$7.3 trillion in 2023, 33 times the amount directed to biodiversity, with the ratio rising to 213 to one for private finance alone. Among the report’s findings:

1. Governments remain under pressure to expand extractive industries because of debt burdens, foreign exchange needs and the structure of the international financial system, even where those industries undermine biodiversity.

2. Voluntary sustainability commitments and disclosure initiatives leave the underlying rules intact; financing biodiversity destruction remains legal, profitable and weakly regulated.

3. Rules that let corporations sue governments for tightening environmental protections can discourage governments from strengthening environmental protections by exposing them to costly legal claims from investors.

4. Market logic is flawed when applied to biodiversity, so the resulting market-oriented biodiversity finance tools—including biodiversity offsets and credits—fail both nature and peoples, while delaying the stronger regulation needed to prevent biodiversity loss at its source.

Rather than focusing exclusively on closing the biodiversity finance gap and on addressing only the symptoms of biodiversity loss, the coalition calls on governments meeting at COP17 to:

• build consensus that the international financial architecture shapes biodiversity outcomes:

• establish binding rules governing financial institutions’ impacts on biodiversity;

• align public and private financial flows with biodiversity goals;

• phase out environmentally harmful subsidies and incentives;

• identify and address the impacts of investment law on biodiversity;

• strengthen protections for Indigenous Peoples, local communities and environmental defenders; and

• ensure biodiversity policies address the underlying economic and financial systems that continue driving ecosystem destruction.

Quotes from authoring organizations

“The world is preparing to assess why we remain off track to halt biodiversity loss, but that conversation will be incomplete if it ignores the systems that continue to finance and incentivize destruction,” said Lim Li Lin, Senior Researcher at the Third World Network. “We cannot solve the biodiversity crisis while the global economic rules of the game continue rewarding powerful and wealthy actors who write the rules and drive the destruction.”

“We won’t be able to finance our way out of biodiversity collapse while trillions continue to bankroll its destruction. Public finance for nature is essential, but it will be undermined unless governments also tackle the far larger flows financing destruction. That means changing the rules that allow banks, investors and insurers to keep financing and profiting from the activities driving biodiversity loss and rights harms,” said Tom Picken, Forests & Finance Policy Director at Rainforest Action Network.

Mirna Ines Fernández, a researcher with Third World Network, pointed to the problems of depending on the market in the context of the focus on the biodiversity funding gap. “Market-based approaches are sold as the ‘solution’ to the biodiversity crisis. But this focus on raising money through financializing nature has resulted in new markets that profit from the biodiversity crisis. We should not aim to make nature attractive to financial markets, but instead make biodiversity protection a non-negotiable responsibility,” she said.

As Nele Marien, International Program Coordinator at Friends of the Earth International, puts it: “As long as investor profits prevail over nature protection, COP17 negotiations won’t get us anywhere. Global South countries are being sued by corporations for trying to protect biodiversity. If governments are serious about halting the biodiversity crisis, they must reverse the current logic:  stop treating environmental protection as subordinate to investment protection. Ecological integrity should set the outer limits of the global economy.”