Finance for nature: A global estimate of public biodiversity investments

Andrew Seidl, Kelvin Mulungu, Marco Arlaud, Onno van den Heuvel and Massimiliano Riva

Ecosystem Services, 2020, vol. 46, issue C

Abstract: Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet at the 15th Conference of Parties (COP 15) to carve out a post-2020 framework for global biodiversity conservation. Finance will be among the priority concerns. No global estimates of public biodiversity investments are in the peer reviewed literature. The methodology developed by the Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN) provides a means for countries to account systematically for their biodiversity expenditures. Importantly, budget lines that intentionally, but secondarily, affect biodiversity outcomes are assigned a percentage at which they can be attributed to biodiversity. A sample of thirty countries facilitated the construction of a panel to predict public biodiversity investments at a global level. Here we show that global public biodiversity investments have increased steadily to an average of US$121 billion invested annually from 2008–2017, or 0.19–0.25% of global GDP. Our data not only indicate an increasing trend in total biodiversity investment, but also an increase in the percentage of total public domestic investment dedicated to biodiversity.

Keywords: Biodiversity finance; Public investment; Global estimate; United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212041620301583
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoser:v:46:y:2020:i:c:s2212041620301583

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecoser.2020.101216

Access Statistics for this article

Ecosystem Services is currently edited by Leon C Braat

More articles in Ecosystem Services from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().