Post date 26 Oct 2026 (original LinkedIn date)
Original LinkedIn version· 5,194 words
‘Fields of gold’ by Sting, from his ‘Ten Summoner’s Tales’ album in 1993
As the world’s biodiversity community is gathered in Yerevan, I think the question is no longer simply how to raise more money for nature. Instead maybe we should simply ask whether we’re prepared to change the economic and financial conditions that make nature degradation so much easier to finance than its recovery.
I’m back in Yerevan, Armenia, for COP17 of the Convention on Biological Diversity, having spent much of last week in excellent company walking through the forests and mountains of Dilijan National Park along the Transcaucasian Trail.
Walking beneath the beech and oak forests, past Gosh Lake and the old monasteries, was a useful reminder of what all the discussions, negotiations and financial commitments at COP are ultimately about. It was also a reminder of how hard these landscapes work. Forested slopes hold the soil, absorb snowmelt and summer storms, release water gradually into the valleys below and help regulate local temperatures. As a Flood Rescue Tactical Advisor, I’ve seen rather too often what happens when landscapes lose their capacity to manage water. The consequences arrive downstream, sometimes quite literally, in damaged homes, roads, railway lines and electricity infrastructure.
Nature is not simply something beautiful that we should preserve. Functioning ecosystems are also an essential part of the infrastructure upon which our economies depend. Yet we continue to treat them as an inexhaustible resource. That was the key part of the message I brought to the closing panel of the Business and Biodiversity Forum at COP17, where we explored what it might take to scale private investment in nature, and what lessons we might learn from the extraordinary growth of renewable energy over the past twenty years.
It also connects to a question I’ve been mulling over for some time: what if the nature finance gap isn’t really a finance gap after all?
The uncomfortable arithmetic
Four years after the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was agreed, we are approaching the halfway point towards the 2030 deadline. The first formal Global Review of progress has now been published (less than impressive!), alongside the Yerevan Declaration, Taking Action for Nature. Both make interesting, if rather uncomfortable, reading. There is no great mystery about the underlying problem. Biodiversity continues to decline, the principal drivers of that decline are well understood, and the actions required to reverse it are hardly new. What remains much less convincing is our collective ability to turn those ambitions into changes in the way economies operate.
I think that the financial dimension is particularly revealing. We have spent much of the past four years talking about the nature finance gap, generally understood as the difference between what is currently being spent on biodiversity protection and restoration, and what needs to be spent to meet our international commitments. That gap is unquestionably real, and for many countries, communities and conservation organisations, the lack of funding represents an immediate and sometimes overwhelming constraint. But increasingly I wonder whether describing our problem principally as a shortage of finance obscures something more fundamental.
What if the nature finance gap is actually the visible consequence of an economic system that is still organised to reward nature’s degradation, while making its protection and restoration extraordinarily difficult to finance? The Kunming-Montreal Framework established two particularly important financial targets. Target 19 calls for the mobilisation of at least $200 billion annually for biodiversity by 2030, including $30 billion in international biodiversity finance. Target 18 seeks the elimination, phasing out or reform of harmful incentives, including subsidies, reducing them by at least $500 billion annually over the same period. We tend to hear rather more about the first of these than the second.
Yet UNEP’s State of Finance for Nature 2026 suggests that the imbalance deserves much greater attention. Using 2023 data, it estimates that some $220 billion was invested globally in nature-based solutions, of which only $23 billion came from private finance. In the same year, an estimated $7.3 trillion flowed into nature-negative activities, including environmentally harmful public subsidies and private investment in sectors associated with substantial ecological pressures. OK, these aren’t perfectly comparable measures of biodiversity finance, and we should be careful not to treat every $ in either category as equivalent. Nevertheless, their relative scale is difficult to ignore. For every dollar invested in nature-based solutions, roughly thirty dollars flowed towards activities classified as harmful to nature - yep, you read that right, 1:30! We are, in effect, trying to fill a bucket while continuing to operate a considerably larger system for emptying it.
The newly published CBD Global Review makes this imbalance rather more uncomfortable. Of the Parties submitting national targets, only 27% address, even to some extent, the commitment to reduce harmful incentives by at least $500 billion annually by 2030. Just 5% have established quantitative national targets for reducing harmful incentives, while the 2025 milestone for identifying those incentives appears not to have been achieved. Meanwhile, progress against both Targets 18 and 19 falls within the lowest category of the CBD’s relative assessment of implementation. The report finds that although biodiversity finance is increasing, the $20 billion international finance milestone for 2025 was probably missed, although complete reporting for 2024 and 2025 will be required before that can be confirmed.
Private biodiversity finance, at least as captured in national reporting, remains particularly underdeveloped. The data suggest that flows peaked in 2021 and subsequently declined, although the CBD acknowledges that incomplete reporting makes it difficult to distinguish a genuine reduction from reporting delays. None of this makes the financing targets irrelevant, in fact arguably quite the opposite. Public funding, concessional capital and international transfers remain indispensable, not least because many of the countries containing the world’s most important biodiversity have the least financial capacity to protect it. But it is difficult to escape the impression that we have been considerably more enthusiastic about finding new sources of money for nature than about challenging the existing economic arrangements that make its destruction profitable. An increase in restoration expenditure is welcome, sure, but an economy that finances restoration with one hand while underwriting further destruction with the other is rather harder to celebrate.
The gap between ambition and implementation
A recent paper in Conservation Letters, led by Oxford’s E. J. Milner-Gulland, is, I think, a useful starting point for understanding the challenge facing Yerevan. The authors distinguish between three rather different gaps. There is the potential difference between the ambition of the Global Biodiversity Framework and the level of its individual targets; the difference between those global targets and the commitments made by national governments; and finally, the difference between national commitments and what actually happens to biodiversity on the ground. In short, it is quite possible to make progress against one without achieving very much against the others.
The CBD’s Global Review now provides an unusually clear illustration of this problem. By its reporting cut-off, 83% of Parties had submitted national targets, but only 45% had submitted updated National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans. Even among the strategies submitted, only about half included financing elements, with relatively few containing detailed costing, funding strategies or assessments of financing gaps. So we have become quite accomplished at describing where we would like to get to, but appear to be struggling rather more with the business of working out how to get there.
There are, of course, perfectly legitimate explanations for some of this. Developing comprehensive national strategies takes time, institutional capacity and money, and the report acknowledges that delays in accessing financial and technical support have themselves impeded progress. Furthermore, ecological recovery operates on timescales that don’t necessarily sit comfortably with international reporting cycles. A restored ecosystem may take years or decades to demonstrate measurable improvements in biodiversity. But these considerations make the distinction between ambition, implementation and outcomes more important, not less.
Countries can adopt ambitious strategies, introduce new reporting processes, expand protected areas and demonstrate rising expenditure, while continuing to pursue economic policies that drive habitat destruction, pollution and unsustainable resource extraction. National success can also disguise international failure, particularly where consumption and investment in one country are responsible for ecological damage somewhere else. Milner-Gulland and colleagues use the relationship between the UK and Brazil to illustrate the problem. A wealthy country might improve biodiversity within its own borders while continuing to import products or finance activities responsible for nature loss overseas. The country bearing the ecological cost may then find itself unable to deliver its own conservation commitments because the economic incentives supporting extraction remain overwhelmingly powerful. The result is a rather uncomfortable possibility: everybody can report progress against selected national indicators while the global ecological position continues to deteriorate.
This is why better monitoring and independent assessment are important, although they cannot solve the problem on their own. We need to understand not simply what governments have promised, or what they have spent, but which policies have changed, how those changes are being implemented, and whether their cumulative effects are sufficient to alter the trajectory of nature loss. There is a difference between financing activity and financing change. I suspect we haven’t yet become particularly good at recognising it.
When the financial system works against nature
Jessica Dempsey and Audrey Irvine-Broque take this argument into rather more challenging territory in a recent Nature Ecology & Evolution paper examining the relationship between biodiversity and the international financial architecture. Their proposition is that the financial rules governing the global economy are not neutral with respect to biodiversity. In some circumstances, they actively reinforce the economic activities responsible for its decline.
Consider a biodiversity-rich country with substantial sovereign debt, limited access to affordable international borrowing and a continuing need to earn foreign currency. Commodity exports, whether agricultural products, timber, minerals or hydrocarbons, may provide one of its most reliable means of meeting those obligations. The financial logic supporting extraction may therefore be entirely rational, at least in the short term, even where its ecological consequences undermine the country’s long-term productive capacity. Add pressure to maintain credit ratings, attract foreign investment and contain public expenditure, and conservation starts to look less like an economic opportunity than a competing claim on an already constrained national balance sheet. This is a rather different problem from persuading another pension fund to allocate a modest proportion of its portfolio to natural capital.
It also exposes an uncomfortable limitation in parts of the nature finance conversation. We can design increasingly sophisticated biodiversity credits, conservation bonds, blended-finance vehicles and investment funds, all of which may have useful roles to play. But if the wider financial system continues to make extraction more immediately rewarding than conservation, those instruments are operating against the prevailing economics.
There are reasonable, sensible questions to ask about how far reform of the international financial architecture can realistically be pursued through a biodiversity convention. COP17 isn’t a meeting of finance ministers or central bank governors, and we shouldn’t expect it to resolve sovereign debt or international currency arrangements. Nevertheless, pretending that these arrangements sit outside the biodiversity problem seems increasingly difficult to defend.
The Yerevan Declaration offers some encouragement here. It calls for biodiversity to be mainstreamed across public policy and economic sectors, for greater policy coherence, and for sustainable production and consumption across the economy and financial system. It also recognises the importance of creating fiscal space and developing catalytic incentives for nature-based solutions. That is welcome, and rather more ambitious than another appeal to mobilise private capital. But a declaration of intent is not an implementation mechanism. It doesn’t tell us who will change the incentives, what financial obligations will follow, or how the risks and costs of ecological transition will be distributed. simply put, nature finance cannot be considered independently of the much larger financial system within which it operates.
From ecological value to investable cash flow
There is a second, rather more practical difficulty which I think deserves much more attention. Over recent years, we have made real progress in describing the economic importance of nature. The Dasgupta Review helped establish the conceptual foundations, while developments in natural capital accounting, ecosystem-service valuation, biodiversity measurement and nature-related financial disclosure have begun to make that importance more visible to businesses and investors. But visibility is not the same as investability.
A functioning wetland may improve water quality, reduce downstream flood exposure, support biodiversity, store carbon and provide recreational and health benefits. These services are economically valuable, sometimes enormously so. They may also reduce costs, protect productive capacity and make neighbouring infrastructure considerably more resilient. None of this necessarily creates revenue for the organisation responsible for maintaining the wetland. The beneficiaries may be numerous, the benefits unevenly distributed, and the relationship between ecological intervention and economic outcome difficult to establish with sufficient confidence. Some benefits will be immediate, others may materialise over decades. Some can be measured directly, while others can only be estimated against a counterfactual which will itself change as the climate and surrounding landscape change.
An investor looking at such an opportunity is therefore entitled to ask some quite ordinary questions. Who benefits? Who is prepared, or obliged, to pay? What exactly are they buying? What evidence will demonstrate that the service has been delivered? Who bears the cost if ecological performance differs from expectations, and how durable are the resulting payment obligations? Those questions don’t become any less important because the underlying asset is natural rather than manufactured.
A recent paper by Sophie Taysom and Patrick Schmucki, The Legibility Problem Across Real Assets, explores a closely related difficulty in adaptation and resilience finance. Their argument is that conventional financial structures struggle to accommodate benefits that are systemic, difficult to attribute and often realised through losses that don’t occur. They identify missing institutional arrangements around reference conditions, outcome verification, the capture of diffuse benefits, long-term governance and valuation. I suspect that much of this applies equally to nature finance.
Interestingly, the CBD Global Review recognises that even where countries are developing biodiversity-finance strategies, evidence of their effectiveness is often confined to individual instruments and case studies rather than systematic measurement of outcomes. The report also points to substantial weaknesses in the availability and consistency of private-finance data. This leaves us with a problem that is more fundamental than the absence of an agreed biodiversity metric. We need to be able to specify what ecological performance can reasonably be expected, how it will be monitored, and which uncertainties cannot sensibly be eliminated. We then need financial arrangements that reflect those distinctions.
Consider a catchment restoration programme designed to improve water quality and reduce downstream flooding. There may be reasonable confidence that particular land-management interventions will improve soil condition, reduce runoff or restore ecosystem function. There may be rather less certainty about their precise contribution to flood losses avoided during a particular storm. A long-term contract could reasonably reward verified improvements in ecological condition and agreed services, while allocating the uncertainty associated with extreme weather and wider catchment behaviour to those better able to bear it.
Traditional infrastructure finance has been dealing with variations of this problem for decades. Performance standards, availability payments, regulated revenues, public procurement and long-term service contracts all represent ways of connecting economically useful assets with dependable payment arrangements. Ecological systems are not identical to manufactured infrastructure, and we should be wary of pretending otherwise. But the challenge of translating a valuable service into an enforceable economic obligation is familiar territory. We have spent considerable effort trying to make ecology legible to finance. Perhaps we now need to devote rather more attention to making the economic relationships surrounding ecology sufficiently legible to support credible financial commitments. This is the distinction between value, revenue and investment.
Nature creates value; where private investment is appropriate, that value must become revenue before it can support dependable cash flow, and that cash flow must be sufficiently durable, measurable and appropriately risk-adjusted before it becomes investable. Too often, we try to begin at the investment end of all of that.
What renewable energy can teach us
This was the argument I attempted to develop during the closing dialogue at the Business and Biodiversity Forum. 15-20 years ago, wind and solar energy were widely regarded as expensive, risky and difficult to finance at scale. Today, clean energy investment runs into the trillions of dollars annually. The technological advances and dramatic reductions in equipment costs have been enormously important, but they aren’t the whole explanation. What made renewable energy increasingly investable was the development of a financial and institutional architecture capable of supporting large-scale deployment.
Three elements seem particularly relevant to nature finance. The first is contracted revenue - power purchase agreements provided lenders and investors with answers to some very basic questions. Who would buy the electricity? At what price? For how long? And under what contractual terms? A predictable revenue stream allowed investors to assess the risks and finance projects against future cash flows rather than relying entirely on the balance sheets of developers.
The second was a degree of stability during the early years of market development. In the UK, Contracts for Difference helped reduce revenue uncertainty by establishing a contractual strike price for electricity generation. Public policy did not eliminate investment risk, but it made important elements of that risk more manageable. Combined with technological progress, competition and scale, this helped transform the economics of renewable energy. And the third was standardisation - institutional investors don’t generally want to undertake bespoke due diligence on hundreds of entirely different small projects. Standard contractual arrangements, accepted approaches to risk allocation, established performance measures and increasingly familiar financing structures all helped lower transaction costs and make portfolios of projects easier to finance.
None of these developments happened automatically. They required deliberate policy choices, regulatory support, public investment and considerable institutional innovation. And none of this means that nature is simply another form of renewable energy. Ecological outcomes are more complex, often less directly measurable and more dependent upon the wider system within which an intervention takes place. Nature doesn’t generate a standardised commodity like a megawatt-hour of electricity. But the financial lesson remains important.
Capital follows contracted outcomes.
We have spent considerable effort trying to persuade investors of the importance of natural capital. Perhaps we should spend rather more time creating the conditions under which those who benefit from functioning ecosystems can contract for the services they provide.
This doesn’t require every ecosystem service to become a tradable commodity. It does require us to be more precise about the relationship between ecological performance, economic benefit and the obligations of those who ultimately pay.
Making natural resilience investable
One of the examples I discussed in Yerevan was the Evenlode Landscape Recovery project in the Cotswolds, near Oxford. I suspect that most of my readers will be well-versed in its merits. The project brings together more than fifty farmers working across over 3,000 hectares of the Evenlode catchment, with a programme of restoration and improved land management intended to operate over twenty years. The landscape interventions include wetlands, woodland, meadows, reconnected floodplains and changes to agricultural practices. They aim to improve ecological condition and water management while allowing the participating farms to continue producing food.
But what makes the project particularly interesting from a finance perspective is the relationship between the landscape and those whose infrastructure depends upon its condition. Network Rail operates a railway that crosses the River Evenlode repeatedly and is exposed to flooding. SSEN has electricity infrastructure in the catchment, while Oxfordshire County Council is responsible for roads that can also be affected by flood events. These organisations have an economic interest in better water management across the landscape. Reduced flood exposure has the potential to mean fewer service interruptions, lower repair costs and more reliable infrastructure.
The project offers an illustration of how public landscape-recovery funding can sit alongside payments from downstream beneficiaries, with participating farmers rewarded for natural flood management. The arrangements are not identical to the fully standardised power purchase agreements that helped renewable energy scale, and their financing structure is still developing. But the underlying commercial logic is worth examining. Rather than asking businesses to support restoration simply because it is environmentally desirable, the proposition begins with something they already recognise: the performance and resilience of assets upon which their operations depend. It then asks whether that dependency can become a durable contractual relationship with those managing the landscape.
In principle, this could involve a combination of payments for maintaining agreed interventions, performance-related payments linked to verified outcomes and appropriate mechanisms for sharing ecological and financial risks. Public money would continue to play an essential role, supporting wider ecological and social benefits while helping to establish the conditions under which private payments become viable. The attraction is not that nature suddenly becomes risk-free or that all its benefits can be reduced to financial transactions. Rather it is that we begin to establish a clearer economic connection between those who maintain ecological systems and those who depend upon them. That feels like a much more promising starting point for private investment than simply asking institutional investors to allocate more money to biodiversity.
What are we actually financing?
There is a temptation here to suggest that we simply need better biodiversity markets, but I think that would be too narrow an answer. Credits can create useful revenue where there is genuine demand, credible measurement and sufficiently robust rules governing additionality, permanence and ecological integrity. But there are limits to the services which can sensibly be converted into tradable units, and voluntary demand alone is unlikely to support the breadth of ecological recovery required. Other mechanisms may be more promising in particular circumstances.
Water utilities may have compelling reasons to support upstream land management that improves water quality or moderates flooding. Insurers and infrastructure owners may benefit from reduced physical risk. Agricultural businesses may have a direct economic interest in protecting the ecological systems upon which their supply chains depend. The difficulty lies in moving from identifying those benefits to establishing who should pay for them, on what terms, and with what degree of confidence in the outcomes.
And there is another difficulty. Nature doesn’t operate within the convenient boundaries of financial assets, administrative jurisdictions or investment portfolios. A restored river corridor may deliver benefits far beyond the land upon which the intervention takes place. Woodland management, peatland restoration, agricultural practices and urban drainage can interact in ways that materially alter the performance of an entire catchment. A project that looks successful when assessed in isolation may have rather less significance if ecological connectivity, upstream pressures or surrounding land use remain unchanged. This makes the familiar project-by-project approach to nature finance potentially inadequate.
It doesn’t mean we should stop financing individual projects. They are, after all, where much of the necessary ecological work takes place. But it does mean that financial and governance arrangements may need to operate at a different scale from the interventions themselves. That raises awkward questions about coordination, accountability and long-term maintenance. It also brings us back to the need for institutions capable of connecting multiple beneficiaries with multiple land managers, while recognising that ecological performance depends on a whole system rather than the sum of its individual components.
There is an encouraging connection here with the broader international agenda. The Yerevan Declaration explicitly calls for stronger cooperation and policy coherence between the Rio conventions, recognising the interconnected nature of biodiversity, climate and land degradation. A wetland doesn’t distinguish between biodiversity, carbon storage, water security and flood resilience and neither does a degraded catchment. These distinctions belong largely to our policy, reporting and financial arrangements. Maybe if we want to finance functioning natural systems, we may need to become rather less attached to financing their individual benefits through entirely separate mechanisms.
Nor should we assume that every benefit requires a market transaction. Public provision, regulation, taxation and collective stewardship remain legitimate, and often essential, means of protecting the ecological foundations of an economy. Some natural systems are simply too important, too interconnected or too difficult to attribute to individual beneficiaries for private contractual arrangements to carry the principal responsibility for their protection. Indeed, one of the risks in our enthusiasm for mobilising private capital is that we confuse the existence of a public economic benefit with the existence of a private investment opportunity and they are by no means the same thing.
Making it easier to buy natural resilience
During the closing panel in Yerevan, I was asked what I would change if I had a magic wand. My answer was simple: I would make it as easy for businesses to buy natural resilience as it now is to buy clean power (my tongue in cheek line about lawyers and accountants saving the world got trotted out again!). That is, of course, rather easier to say than to achieve. But renewable energy offers some useful lessons about what needs to happen.
We need more standardised outcome contracts that businesses, investors and lenders can understand without having to develop an entirely new legal and financial structure for every project. We need better mechanisms for allocating and transferring risk, including insurance arrangements capable of addressing some of the uncertainties associated with ecological performance. And perhaps most importantly, we need to create demand before expecting supply to emerge at scale.
Advance commitments from businesses willing to purchase verified ecosystem services or resilience outcomes could provide the confidence needed for land managers and project developers to invest in restoration. Public finance can help establish those markets, provide appropriate guarantees or revenue support, and ensure that broader public benefits are not lost in the pursuit of commercially measurable outcomes. But none of this will happen simply because more investors are persuaded that nature matters. It requires the same kind of deliberate institutional development that helped make renewable energy financeable: credible demand, dependable contracts, appropriate public support and a sufficiently predictable environment for long-term investment.
And even then, this will address only part of the wider biodiversity challenge. Reforming harmful subsidies, reducing nature-negative financial flows, strengthening environmental regulation and ensuring adequate public financing remain indispensable. The objective is not to turn every forest, river or wetland into a financial asset. It is to ensure that the economic value created by functioning natural systems is recognised in the decisions and obligations of those who depend upon them.
What I hope COP17 will achieve
As we enter the second week of CBD COP17, I don’t underestimate the importance of further financial commitments at COP17. For countries struggling to fund conservation, implement national biodiversity strategies or meet existing international obligations, money matters enormously. The same is true for the communities and organisations carrying out restoration and stewardship on the ground. And the Global Review is quite explicit that inadequate and delayed finance, insufficient institutional capacity and problems accessing technical support are substantial barriers to implementation. We shouldn’t dismiss those difficulties in pursuit of a more intellectually appealing systemic explanation.
But the report also identifies weaknesses in policy coherence, the reform of harmful incentives, the mobilisation of private finance and the translation of national biodiversity strategies into actionable, adequately financed programmes. These are not simply different descriptions of a funding shortfall. They point towards the conditions under which funding can be used effectively, and towards the economic pressures that make further biodiversity loss difficult to avoid.
The Yerevan Declaration recognises many of these challenges. Its calls for predictable finance, policy coherence, catalytic incentives and sustainable production and consumption are encouraging. But the distance between political recognition and practical implementation remains considerable.
I’d like to hear more about how governments intend to alter incentives that continue to favour degradation. About which economic actors depend upon functioning ecosystems, and how that dependency might translate into credible demand for their protection. About how ecological outcomes can be measured without pretending away uncertainty, and how contracts can allocate that uncertainty between those delivering services and those benefiting from them.
I’d also like to hear more about institutions. Who will take responsibility for coordinating investment across landscapes and catchments? What legal and financial arrangements might endure for the decades over which restoration must be maintained? How do we ensure that local communities and Indigenous Peoples are not simply participants in someone else’s investment proposition, but retain meaningful rights, influence and economic benefit? And perhaps we should become a little more demanding about what counts as success.
The Global Review tells us how far implementation is falling short. The Yerevan Declaration tells us that political leaders recognise the need to accelerate. Neither really provides a convincing answer to how ecological value will be translated into the economic and institutional arrangements capable of financing recovery at scale. More finance is necessary, but the ultimate objective isn’t a larger nature-finance market. It is an economy which can maintain and restore the natural systems upon which its continued prosperity depends. That requires reducing the incentives to destroy nature as well as increasing the rewards for protecting it.
COP15 gave us an internationally agreed destination. COP17 provides an opportunity to examine whether the arrangements we have built since then are capable of taking us there. After several days in Yerevan, including some particularly stimulating conversations at the Business and Biodiversity Forum, I’m encouraged by the growing recognition that nature is not simply an environmental concern but an economic foundation upon which businesses, communities and infrastructure depend. But recognition is only the beginning.
The shortage of capital is real. Unless we address the economic incentives, institutions and contractual arrangements that determine where capital flows, we risk treating the symptom while leaving the underlying condition largely untouched. Perhaps the question we should be asking is no longer simply how to close the nature finance gap, but how to build an economy in which maintaining nature’s value is at least as financially rational as destroying it. And where purchasing natural resilience becomes as straightforward as purchasing clean electricity. Now that would represent rather more meaningful progress.
References
Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (2026). State of Biodiversity Action: Global Report on Collective Progress in the Implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Montreal. https://www.cbd.int/globalreview/report2026
Leaders for Nature Summit (2026). Yerevan Declaration: Taking Action for Nature. Yerevan, Armenia, 16 October 2026.
Convention on Biological Diversity (2022). Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, particularly Targets 18 and 19.
Milner-Gulland, E. J. et al. (2026). A Critical Year for Nature: Now Is the Time to Accelerate Action on the Global Biodiversity Framework. Conservation Letters, 19, e70089. https://doi.org/10.1111/con4.70089
Dempsey, J. and Irvine-Broque, A. (2026). Three ways that international financial architecture reform matters for biodiversity. Nature Ecology & Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-026-03194-z
Taysom, S. and Schmucki, P. (2026). The Legibility Problem Across Real Assets: Adaptation and Resilience Finance Without a Shared Language. Keyah Consulting and Resilion. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21915489
United Nations Environment Programme (2026). State of Finance for Nature 2026: Nature in the Red, Powering the Trillion Dollar Nature Transition Economy.
Dasgupta, P. (2021). The Economics of Biodiversity: The Dasgupta Review. HM Treasury.
International Energy Agency (2026). World Energy Investment 2026.
Nature Climate Change (2026). Biodiversity and the Conferences of the Parties. Editorial.