No one can be in any doubt that we are in a planetary emergency. The interrelated crises of biodiversity loss, land degradation and climate change — driven by unsustainable production and consumption — require urgent and immediate global action.
The new “State of Finance for Nature” report assesses how much public and private investment is being directed towards naturebased solutions and provides insights into the extent to which governments, businesses and financiers are “walking-the-talk”.
A recent joint study by UNEP and the University of Oxford “Are we building back better?” revealed that out of USD 14.6 trillion the world’s 50 largest economies announced in fiscal spending in the wake of COVID-19, just USD 368 billion (2.5 per cent) were directed towards green initiatives.
The lessons are not being learned. As governments plan their COVID recovery policies stimulus plans, we urge world leaders to ensure that public funding helps meet objectives under the Paris Climate Agreement and serves to halt and reverse the loss of biodiversity.

Second, now is the time to galvanize political and business momentum to restore our Earth. The upcoming summits on climate, biodiversity, land degradation and food systems provide an opportunity for governments to enhance climate targets through Nationally Determined Contributions, but also commit to an ambitious and transformational post-2020 global biodiversity framework. The latter will be discussed at the 15th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity in Kunming, China. The United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, that runs from 2021 to 2030, is bringing additional impetus and attention to the need to repair the more than 2 billion hectares of degraded land around the world.

Third, this report shows that private finance directed to nature-based solutions must be scaled up significantly. Governments must create the enabling environment that allows this to happen, for example by revisiting agricultural
policies, trade tariffs and developing taxonomies to determine what is sustainable and what is not. But companies and financial institutions must also be part of the solution, by sharing the risk and committing to increase finance and investment in nature-based solutions in an ambitious way, with clear time-bound targets.

We have entered a critical decade in which it is still possible to avoid runaway climate change and ecological breakdown, but only if commitments are met with action. This inaugural “State of Finance for Nature” report is the start of an annual
process of tracking trends in public and private investment in nature-based solutions. As such, it provides a measure of how commitments are being translated into action and an accounting for those who fall short.