Twenty ways countries can catalyze private finance for nature

Robert Steele, Systainability Asia | 17 August 2026

I recently completed an online Biodiversity Finance certificate course from UNDP BIOFIN and the Global Environment Facility (GEF). It deepened my understanding of the rapidly expanding range of financial instruments available to support biodiversity and inspired me to explore how countries can put these mechanisms into practice. This article grew from that learning.

Source note: This article was inspired by and expands on UNDP BIOFIN’s article, “10 ways UNDP BIOFIN is supporting countries to catalyze private finance for nature”, together with the open-source BIOFIN Catalogue of Finance Solutions.

The global biodiversity finance gap can sound impossibly large. The world needs an estimated US$700 billion a year to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Public budgets, philanthropy and development assistance will remain essential, but they cannot close that gap alone.

There is, however, another way to look at the challenge. As UNDP’s Biodiversity Finance Initiative, or BIOFIN, recently observed, US$700 billion is roughly one per cent of the new or reinvested private capital moving through global financial markets each year. The money exists. The deeper problem is that too few nature-positive activities are presented as investable opportunities, while financial rules and incentives still reward many activities that degrade ecosystems.

Private finance for nature is not simply a matter of asking companies to donate more. Countries can change the conditions under which financial decisions are made. They can create investable project pipelines, reduce risk, reward good stewardship, require better disclosure, aggregate small projects and connect financial returns to verified ecological outcomes.

Drawing on BIOFIN’s recent article and its wider Finance Solutions Catalogue, here are 20 practical mechanisms that countries can adapt to their own circumstances.

Click here to download the full article for a more detailed description of each of the 20 mechanisms.