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The 200-to-1 problem that biodiversity finance is avoiding
Blog originally published by ECO
There is an overlooked implication hidden inside this year’s State of Finance for Nature report. Much attention has rightly been given to its headline finding that finance harming nature outweighs nature-positive finance by around 30 to 1. But that comparison combines public and private finance. The report’s own breakdown of those totals tells a different story. Looking only at the private finance figures, financial flows classified as nature-negative outweigh those classified as nature-positive by more than 200 to 1.
| Nature-positive | Nature-negative | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 220 billion | 7.3 trillion |
| Public | 197 billion | 2.4 trillion |
| Private | 23 billion | 4.9 trillion |
This finding should fundamentally change how we frame biodiversity finance discussions under the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Imagine a government discovered it was collecting just one dollar in tax revenue for every 200 dollars lost through tax avoidance and evasion. No finance minister would describe that primarily as a revenue mobilisation challenge. They would recognise it as a governance failure and ask why the system was allowing such enormous losses in the first place.
Yet in biodiversity finance we increasingly do the opposite. Faced with private financial flows harming nature that exceed positive private finance by more than 200 to one, much of the discussion centres on mobilising additional private finance rather than governing the vastly larger financial flows already driving biodiversity loss.
None of this diminishes the importance of long-overdue public finance commitments, which remain fundamental for both equity and implementation. Nor is it an argument against genuinely positive private investment. It is an argument about priorities. If private finance is already influencing biodiversity at more than 200 times the scale in the wrong direction, surely our first question should be why, and how to change where that finance is going.
Private finance is not waiting to be mobilised. It is already mobilised, overwhelmingly towards activities associated with deforestation, ecosystem conversion and violations of Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights.
Economic development requires finance. The question is not whether finance should support development, but what forms of development it incentivises, under what conditions, and with whose interests and rights protected. Finance helps shape those pathways, yet environmental and social safeguards remain patchy, inconsistent and overwhelmingly voluntary.
Banks and investors have responded with no-deforestation policies, voluntary initiatives, sustainability reporting, new green finance products and nature-related disclosures. These developments matter, but they have not materially changed where capital is flowing. Harmful finance remains largely legal, voluntary commitments weak, and implementation weaker still.
The Global Biodiversity Framework already points in a different direction. Target 19 on finance mobilisation sits alongside Target 14 on aligning public and private financial flows, Target 15 on business accountability, and Target 18 on harmful incentives. Together they describe a coherent programme for governing financial systems, not simply raising more money.
The question for COP17 is therefore not whether private finance has a role to play. It clearly does. The question is whether Parties choose to focus primarily on mobilising a comparatively small pool of positive private finance, or on progressively aligning the vastly larger private financial flows already shaping biodiversity outcomes.
As negotiations continue towards COP17, Parties have an opportunity to rebalance that conversation. The Global Review should place harmful financial flows and financial alignment at the centre of implementation discussions. Resource mobilisation should distinguish public finance commitments, positive private finance and harmful private financial flows, while mainstreaming should bring finance ministries, central banks and financial regulators into implementation. This is not asking the CBD to become a financial regulator. It is asking Parties to implement the commitments they have already made under Target 14.
For years, biodiversity finance debates have largely asked how finance can better support biodiversity. COP17 should begin asking the more fundamental question: How should biodiversity reshape finance?