The US$700 billion biodiversity funding gap is a “bogus figure devised by US conservation corporations in collaboration with investment banks to promote private investment and market-based mechanisms”

An unpublished letter to The Guardian.

On 30 October 2024, Guardian journalist Phoebe Weston reported from the Convention on Biological Diversity, COP16, in Colombia.

The article was illustrated with a photograph of Greenpeace activists with a giant piggy bank and a banner reading, “Rich Countries: Break the piggy bank and pay the $20 billion by 2025!”

Weston’s first sentence reads, “Experts agree that the world needs $700bn (£539bn) a year to restore nature — but no one knows where the money is going to come from, and anger is building about rich countries failing to pay their share.”

But who are these “experts” and where does the US$700 billion figure come from?

In a recent analysis of the so-called “biodiversity funding gap”, Andre Standing of the Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements points out that the US$700 billion figure comes from a 2020 report by the Paulson Institute, the Nature Conservancy, and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability.

These three organisations are enthusiastic promoters of the financialisation of nature, which as Frédéric Hache of the Green Finance Observatory notes is a “neoliberal and doomed approach to conservation”.

In his analysis, Standing writes that the report’s findings “are incoherent and based on surprisingly poor research”.

There are many glaring errors and dubious assumptions in the report, including accounting for things such as green bonds, biodiversity offsets and carbon trading as major sources of funding for biodiversity conservation.

The underlying assumption that US$700 billion a year would address the biodiversity crisis is “an illusion”, Standing writes. It is a “convenient story” that fails to address the root causes of biodiversity destruction while requiring minimal changes to the current governance of natural resources.

Standing writes that,

There is no reason to believe that the biodiversity crisis will be averted if the world spends an additional $700 billion a year on biodiversity finance. This view simply equates money with success, ignoring that so much spent on conservation has ambiguous or even adverse outcomes.

In response to Weston’s article in The Guardian, a group of us, including Standing, wrote a letter to the newspaper, aiming to generate more discussion about the ideology underlying the “biodiversity funding gap” and the dangers involved in allowing global capital markets to generate vast sums of money (supposedly) aimed at conserving biodiversity.

The Guardian has (so far) not published the letter.

Here is the letter in full:

$700 billion is a “bogus figure”

Letter to The Guardian, 2 November 2024

Phoebe Weston reports from COP16 in Colombia on the failed efforts to close a “$700 billion funding gap” for nature conservation. She draws attention to the woeful efforts of governments and international organisations to address the biodiversity crisis. Yet we are alarmed that this “funding gap” is now considered the issue on which everything else depends. 

In fact, the $700 billion is a bogus figure devised by US conservation corporations, in collaboration with investment banks, to promote private investment and market-based mechanisms. That delivering on this target has become the critical issue at COP16 demonstrates how big finance has taken over the world of conservation. 

The $700 billion figure was not derived from careful scientific analysis. It was a ‘back of the envelope’ study that cherrypicked and misrepresented the research of others. According to those who chose this figure, closing the gap requires biodiversity offsets thirty times what they are today and a tenfold growth in the amount raised by green bonds. This would hand conservation to financial markets and asset management companies, which are among the most inappropriate stewards of nature. Alternative proposals for conservation, including strengthening land rights for Indigenous communities and promoting small-scale farming and fishing, do not require massive financial capital. 

Believing that a vast amount of money can save biodiversity is a dangerous distraction, although convenient for corporations, conservation NGOs and governments. It encourages equating the destruction of nature with poverty rather than affluence. It also obscures discussions on the need to consume less, forgo profits to save nature and reduce the power of multinational corporations. That so many organisations are consumed in arguments about money shows how far the international community is from finding solutions to the biodiversity crisis. 

Andre Standing, Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements
Larry Lohmann, Nick Hildyard, the Corner House
Ivonne Yanez, Accion Ecologica
Jutta Kill, World Rainforest Movement
Chris Lang, REDD-Monitor
Tamra Gilbertson, Indigenous Environmental Network
Fiore Longo, Survival International
Frederic Hache, Green Finance Observatory
Hugh Govan, Independent
Carsten Pedersen, Transnational Institute
Soumitra Ghosh, All India Forum for Forest Movements
Anne Petermann, Global Justice Ecology Project
Clive Spash, Chair of Public Policy and Governance at WU Vienna