Finance Watch publishes landscape paper on natural capital and ecosystem services
Avoiding climate and environmental breakdown will require more than current efforts to scale up conservation finance. Changes in financial systems are needed as well.
On 6th May 2019, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) warned that human activity is putting a million species at risk. In October 2020, the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will take place in Beijing.
Finance Watch’s landscape paper maps the efforts made so far in conservation finance and suggests some policy ideas ahead of the 2020 COP:
- Central banks should add environmental risk to the macro-prudential framework
- A new task force should be created on corporate and financial disclosure of environmental risks
- Agree common methodology and implement natural capital accounting
- Companies should be required to first assess and then disclose their interactions with natural capital and ecosystem services
- Governments should use natural capital valuations in their policy making
- Governments should mandate and capitalise public banks and actively promote other forms of mission-oriented finance
- Recommendations to promote longer-term investing should be implemented at company, investor and supervisory levels
