Last updated: 12/07/2022

The European Commission, through the Knowledge Centre for Biodiversity, aims at collecting, synthesizing and communicating knowledge on biodiversity financing.

Biodiversity financing can be defined as expenditures that contribute to biodiversity conservation, restoration or sustainable use, whether by directly targeting these objectives or by having positive effects on them (“nature-positive”). Such expenditures come from a variety of sources. Public domestic expenditures, mainly from government budgets (including from the EU and its Member States), represent the majority of biodiversity financing. Since a large part of the world’s biodiversity is located in developing or emerging countries, international financial flows such as official development assistance (ODA) also play a crucial role, including to help leverage domestic funding. The private sector also provides funding through philanthropy, contributions to non-governmental organisations, market-based instruments, green bonds and other channels, although biodiversity finance is still less developed than climate finance. 

Adequate and well-targeted financial resources are a critical factor for halting and reversing biodiversity loss worldwide. At the global level, available estimates (see Publications on biodiversity financing) indicate that the current scale of finance is largely insufficient for achieving biodiversity objectives. Ambitious targets on the mobilisation of resources from all sources, as part of a broad transformative agenda, have been agreed in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) adopted at the 15th Conference of the Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2022. Significant investments will be needed to implement the transformations needed to put Europe’s biodiversity on a path to recovery as well as to contribute to international efforts, as foreseen in the EU Biodiversity Strategy for 2030.

Reducing the global financing gap will also require channeling private and public financial flows away from activities that have negative impacts on biodiversity and towards nature-positive activities. This implies notably the reform of public subsidies that are harmful to biodiversity (estimated at at least USD 800 billion per year globally - see Publications on biodiversity financing), as well as efforts from all actors towards delivering nature-positive outcomes, supported by regulatory frameworks that are conducive to sustainable finance. 

Parties to the CBD are requested to report on their international financial flows and domestic expenditures in support of biodiversity. This reporting is carried out in line with the monitoring framework associated with the KM-GBF. Biodiversity-related ODA flows have been reported for many years to the OECD-Development Assistance Committee, which ensures a relatively good tracking of these flows. Nevertheless, it remains currently difficult to collect complete and consistent data on biodiversity financing, in particular for private flows. Efforts are on-going at the EU and international level to better track and report financial flows that contribute to biodiversity, so as to ensure the efficient mobilisation and deployment of resources.