According to UNEP FI’s latest survey of its members, nature is a top priority for many banks and insurers around the globe demonstrating that biodiversity is no longer a niche interest. From COP17, Jessica Smith, Head of Nature at UNEP FI, explains where we are taking our work with our members over the coming years, and how we intend to accelerate progress.
Negotiators are in Yerevan in Armenia for COP17, with only four years left to deliver the goals set out in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). On current trajectories, those targets will not be met. Finance mobilization falls a long way short of what is needed to close the US$700 billion annual biodiversity finance gap while the broader transformation required to reach the goals and targets is far behind.
At PRI in Person ahead of COP17, we published an assessment of how the finance sector has progressed since COP16 in Cali, Colombia, and it tells a similar story: the finance sector has made significant progress in building the foundations for nature finance. Yet financial flows remain fundamentally misaligned with global biodiversity goals.
Measurement needs to evolve and speed up
Our members cannot help close a gap they cannot see. UNEP’s State of Finance for Nature 2026 finds US$7.3 trillion flowing into nature-negative activities against US$220 billion into nature-based solutions, with the private sector contributing US$4.9 trillion of the harm and a mere US$23 billion of the remedy. But, those findings are based on 2023 data. Anyone setting a credible target, testing a transition claim or reporting against the GBF is working from a picture that is years old and thin where it concerns data on private finance flows, which is critical.
We are therefore aiming to strengthen private finance tracking efforts across the three Rio Conventions – the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Tracking sits beneath everything else we do: without it, target setting drifts and the mobilization discussion rests on anecdotes.
Alongside this work, we plan to publish more case studies, so that what works stops being proprietary knowledge held in a handful of institutions and becomes something the rest of the market can act on.
Redirecting finance to the nature transition
Target 19 of the GBF is about mobilizing new money for nature and gets a lot of attention. Meanwhile, target 18, which seeks to address the money already moving in the wrong direction gets far less attention than its scale warrants.
Our focus is on transition finance in the sectors that determine outcomes: mining, food and agriculture, and increasingly AI and technology, with UNEP FI members asking for more granularity on water, deforestation and nature-based solutions for climate change adaptation.
The aim is to make nature and ocean finance opportunities genuinely bankable in those sectors, and to shift the private portion of Target 18 away from degradation. Two recent initiatives provided structuring lessons and demonstrated what makes these transactions work: ‘Innovative Finance for the Amazon, Cerrado and Chaco‘ – an initiative to increase and accelerate lending and investment in sustainable agriculture in Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, and from ‘Revenues for Nature Indigenous Peoples‘ – an initiative that focuses on identifying, replicating and scaling models and mechanisms that unlock private sector investment into nature restoration and nature-based solutions.
Nature in climate: building the links across UNEP FI’s work programme
Financial institutions have told us clearly that they want climate, nature and social issues handled through a combined risk lens, with sectoral playbooks that can reduce the reporting burden rather than add to it.
The evidence supports integration. The European Central Bank finds that surface water scarcity alone puts almost 15% of euro area economic output at risk under a one-in-25-year drought, with 19% of lending to non-financial corporates exposed and 22% once groundwater scarcity is included. El Niño cycles carry the same drought and flood signal through agricultural portfolios in Asia-Pacific, Latin America and southern Africa.
Water is central to the climate adaptation agenda, making it a natural starting point for our work at the intersection of climate and nature. We are shaping an initiative on nature in climate transition finance, which we expect to launch in 2027, covering transition plans, climate adaptation and resilience finance. We will begin with water, before expanding our focus to the integrity of nature-based solutions, and the convergence of climate and nature risk.
One hydrological system, from ice to high seas
UNEP FI’s marine and freshwater work developed separately. That no longer reflects how the risks behave, so we are bringing marine, freshwater and cryosphere – all ice, snow and permafrost – together and carrying the climate adaptation and resilience agenda from glacier and catchment through to coast and the high seas, including the High Seas Treaty – a legally binding agreement to support conservation and sustainable management of high‑seas biodiversity – and the UNCCD.
Through the High Seas Treaty, we are helping shape financing mechanisms for marine biodiversity conservation and supporting financial institutions in responding to the new framework. In relation to the UNCCD, our focus is on mobilizing finance for land restoration, sustainable water management, and drought resilience.
The cryosphere deserves particular attention. Glacier and ice sheet collapse risk is rising. It is no longer just modelled but materializing. The financial consequences run downstream in every sense: water availability for agriculture and hydropower, catchment stability, coastal exposure, and the insurability of everything sitting in the path. This is not a distant scientific concern, and we will be giving it more of our attention.
There is no transition without a just transition
Indigenous Peoples and local communities steward lands holding more than a third of the Earth’s irrecoverable carbon. Yet, recognized rights extend to only 18.6% of the land they customarily manage and, of the US$5.9 billion in international climate adaptation finance for least developed countries in 2021, just 1% was intended to engage them.1
The threats Indigenous Peoples report most often are linked to activities in the mining, commercial agriculture and logging sectors: precisely the sectors we are prioritizing for transition finance. That overlap is not incidental. Our aim is that Indigenous Peoples are recognized by the finance sector as rights holders and partners, and that direct access is measured rather than asserted, including in the tracking work described above. Going forward, we will continue raising awareness within the finance sector, generating new data to inform discussions and practices, convening stakeholders, and drawing on UNEP FI’s expertise in social rights to strengthen our work in this area.
Our members are ready to do more
According to our 2026 UNEP FI membership survey, nature is steadily becoming the top priority, ahead of climate, for many of the world’s largest banks and insurers. With adaptation being cited as the top climate priority for members. This is not a niche interest any longer. What members are asking for is specific and operational: 80%+ of banking respondents want support on nature-related transition planning, the highest need in the entire survey, with risk assessment and target setting on both practice and impact just behind at over 80% each. In Africa and the Middle East, 65% want substantial support on developing nature finance products, the single strongest regional signal across the whole survey. On the insurance side, 73% of insurance respondents are looking for support with nature risk assessment and management, second only to transition planning for adaptation as the highest need for insurers in the entire survey.
Banks and insurers are telling us they intend to move and asking for the tools to do it. Our job over the next years is to get the tools in their hands fast enough to make meaningful progress by 2030.
Learn more
- Learn more about UNEP FI events at COP17, taking place in Yerevan, Armenia 19-30 October 2026, here.
- Learn more about how you can get involved in nature at UNEP FI here.
[1] Sangat, S.S., Cerda, J., Pastor, C. et al. Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems and practices for climate survival. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 13, 768 (2026)