Financing nature through the Nature Futures Framework

When the Nature Futures Framework was published in 2020 it was the first biodiversity-centric initiative to provide a global framework through which scenarios of nature could be analysed. In the last five years, over 50 scientific papers have been published using this framework to explore how prioritising differing values of nature may influence the future for biodiversity and people. However, much of this work remains in the academic sphere. There is a recognised need for nature scenarios by businesses and financial actors for example, to guide business strategy, for managing financial risk and macroeconomic stability. We discuss the barriers to uptake of the Nature Futures Framework (NFF) with a focus on how it can be applied to guide financial and economic decision making. As well as consideration of barriers, we outline how the multiple values of nature that are encoded in the Nature Futures Framework could provide useful insights to business and financial actors by allowing alignment or integration of multiple objectives relevant to businesses. For example, moving beyond Nature for Society providing a focus on operational risks, Nature for Nature may be able to provide insight on compliance risks, and Nature as Culture on reputational risks. We draw from the use case of the Network for Greening Financial Systems (NGFS), who are working to develop nature scenarios for use by central banks, to provide a concrete example of the gaps between the state of the art in nature models and scenarios and their uptake by financial and business actors. We explore and contrast how scale, both temporal and geographic, and uncertainty are perceived by the research and financial end user communities. We conclude with a call to action for future research to bridge the gap between the academic development of the Nature Futures Framework (NFF) and the user needs, particularly for guiding real world outcomes by these influential actors.