The session will examine the intersection of biodiversity with financial markets, business models, and insurance practices, and what this implies for investment strategies and long-term value creation. It will explore the role of nature credits and similar instruments in shaping biodiversity-positive markets, while critically assessing their credibility and ethical implications. Attention will also be given to policy and governance mechanisms, such as regulation, disclosure, and risk assessment, that support the integration of biodiversity into financial decision-making. A further focus lies on how FIs can operationalise biodiversity-related risks, dependencies, and opportunities, and how new partnerships, frameworks, and innovations may help align capital flows with ecological goals.
By bringing together scholars, practitioners, and policymakers, the session aims to bridge disciplinary and sectoral silos, deepen understanding of biodiversity finance, and surface tensions between financial logics and ecological realities.
The objective of this session is to initiate a discussion on the establishment of biodiversity finance as a transformative mechanism for redirecting financial flows towards ecologically viable and ethically sound futures.
Impact investments have the dual goals of generating profit and environmental and/or social impact from the same project or enterprise. This talk scrutinises recent impact investments in biodiversity conservation and restoration – specifically, debt finance in the form of conventional bonds and impact bonds. The proceeds of these bonds finance projects aiming to enhance forest management, sustainable agriculture, endangered species protection, ecosystem service provision, and nature-based solutions to climate change such as REDD+. The talk will examine whether these dual goals are achievable by evaluating the financial risks and environmental risks within each bond's ‘theory of change’.
Financial risks stem from projects with vague cashflow forecasts, including when returns are tied to market commodities with high price volatility. Environmental risks stem from project sites with low or ambiguous threat statuses, and the use of metrics that are too (i) premature, (ii) vague, (iii) simple, and/or (iv) coarse to indicate conservation outcomes. For example, premature metrics focus on project activities (e.g. planting trees) and outputs (e.g. restored area), rather than the outcomes (e.g. change in forest carbon stock) required to determine impact (e.g. climate change mitigation). Similarly, vague metrics feature unspecific language such as ‘benefit’, ‘support’, and ‘enhance’ all of which evade stipulating clear targets, and make their achievement difficult to prove. Risk mitigation strategies involve using baselines and counterfactuals to establish additionality, and guarantors to protect investors if revenues prove insufficient.
The talk will promote improved bond design and disclosure, to better inform investor decision-making. This will help ensure bonds can fulfil their potential as a transformative mechanism for redirecting finance towards biodiversity-positive outcomes. In particular, bond proponents should be vigilant to ‘impact washing’ – claiming a bond has delivered greater biodiversity outcomes than it actually has. The talk centres on a paper published in Business Strategy and the Environment (Thompson, 2023) alongside forthcoming work in Nature Reviews Biodiversity. Implications for biodiversity management and for-profit conservation will be discussed.
Thompson, B.S. (2023). Impact investing in biodiversity conservation with bonds: An analysis of environmental and financial risk. Business Strategy and the Environment 32, 353-368.
How to cite: Thompson, B.: Impact investing in biodiversity conservation with bonds: An analysis of financial and environmental risk, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-144, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-144, 2026.
Our planet continues to suffer a downward trend in biodiversity. Reversing this trend requires addressing the financial gap in nature conservation and restoration investment under scarce public funds. The Global Biodiversity Framework estimates $942 billion per year is needed from biodiversity finance to help solve the biodiversity crisis. To reduce this biodiversity finance gap, a variety of tools exist that direct private, public and blended finance to generate biodiversity positive outcomes. The role of financial markets in biodiversity conservation has been broad in terms of novel instruments and frameworks but shallow in impact of reversing biodiversity decline. We performed interviews with financial experts focused on biodiversity impact bonds to understand the challenges and opportunities of transparency, additionality and liquidity of how investments into biodiversity from financial markets can assist in bending the curve. The sum of all public spending on biodiversity and private market innovations has yet to ‘bend the curve’ of biodiversity decline as envisaged in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and reversing biodiversity decline is not helped when we have yet to agree on a standard for what we mean by biodiversity nor how we should value biodiversity. To reduce this biodiversity finance gap, a variety of tools exist that direct private, public and blended finance to generate biodiversity positive outcomes, including building markets for nature conservation (for example, carbon and biodiversity offsets markets), and creating financial market instruments such as green bonds and debts for swaps. This paper focuses on the latter, i.e., in financial markets instruments are those regulated by regulators as the role of these financial markets in biodiversity conservation has been limited in capital raised relative to the overall size of international markets. The overall global bond market stands at $133 trillion of which $5.7 trillion are labelled as green bonds, which would be ample to plug the biodiversity gap. However, only 3% or $171 billion of those green bonds have some allocated benefit for biodiversity. We present the results of 23 interviews with financial markets experts across Europe and North America investigating the barriers and opportunities for leveraging financial markets in nature conservation.
How to cite: Luong, H., Thijssen, J., Beale, C., and Touza, J.: The challenges of biodiversity investments through financial markets, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-43, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-43, 2026.
Biodiversity loss poses an increasingly material risk to companies and investors, yet its integration into corporate and financial risk management remains limited due to data scarcity, methodological fragmentation, and a lack of spatial precision. This paper introduces the Bio-Value-at-Risk (BioVaR) framework, a bottom-up, scenario-based approach that quantifies the financial implications of biodiversity loss at the level of individual corporate assets. By overlaying geospatial biodiversity indicators derived from high-resolution remote sensing data with asset-level operational information, the method attributes localized ecosystem impacts to specific company sites. These physical impacts are translated into site-specific financial loss estimates through empirically calibrated cost functions, which incorporate both physical and transition risks, including regulatory and reputational effects. Aggregating these local losses across a firm’s operations allows the construction of biodiversity-conditioned financial statements and the estimation of valuation effects on equity and debt positions. When consistently applied across firms, these company-level valuations form the basis for portfolio-level risk measures such as BioVaR or biodiversity-related Expected Shortfall.
The framework generalizes established principles of operational risk management to nature-related risks and connects geospatial environmental data with financial valuation models and scenario analysis. It enables the derivation of probability distributions of biodiversity-related financial losses under globally consistent scenarios, including those conditioned on climate pathways or regional regulatory responses. Compared with prevailing top-down approaches, BioVaR provides higher spatial, temporal, and sectoral resolution, allowing investors, regulators, and policymakers to identify, price, and manage biodiversity risk exposures through targeted investment, lending, and credit decisions rather than sector-wide exclusions.
The study demonstrates that linking satellite-based biodiversity metrics with asset-level financial data enables consistent quantification, internalization, and aggregation of nature-related risks within corporate risk frameworks and portfolio management. The BioVaR concept thus advances the operationalization of spatial sustainable finance and offers a scalable, data-driven pathway toward integrating biodiversity considerations into financial risk analysis, disclosure, and strategic decision-making.
How to cite: Posth, J.-A., Schwendner, P., Laube, P., and Orpiszewski, T.: Bio-Value-at-Risk: A Scenario-based Concept to Assessing the Implications of Biodiversity Risks on Financial Portfolio Management using Geospatial Analysis, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-75, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-75, 2026.
Policy attention to banks’ role in halting biodiversity loss is growing, but centers on disclosure rather than lending practices. Using global loan-level data covering 7,918 syndicated loans issued between 2010 and 2023, we examine whether commitment to the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) affects the amount of loans banks extend to borrowers exposed to biodiversity-related risks and their propensity to offload these loans on the secondary market. Such commitments create incentives and pressures beyond transparency and disclosure requirements that influence banks’ lending and portfolio decisions.
Biodiversity-related risks arise mainly through two channels: dependency and impact risk. Dependency risk is narrowly financially material because it directly affects borrowers’ cash flows and repayment capacity. Impact risk reflects double materiality, as it affects biodiversity itself and can also become financially material when borrowers’ environmental externalities generate reputational or regulatory risks. Assessing whether UNEP FI–committed banks manage these risks differently from non-committed peers helps determine whether sustainability commitments lead to more proactive risk management. We measure borrowers’ biodiversity risk using firm-level impact and dependency indicators from Iceberg Data Lab and industry-level measures from ENCORE.
We find that higher dependency is associated with smaller loan amounts across all lenders. By contrast, impact risk is where commitments matter: UNEP-FI lenders extend less credit to borrowers with high bio impact. This pattern could reflect either post-membership adjustments or the possibility that future signatories are already ‘greener’. Our pre- and post-commitment analysis supports the former. We also show that lenders tend to offload high-impact exposures through the secondary loan market. This effect is driven primarily by cross-sector differences in biodiversity impact, rather than variations within sectors. Non-committed lenders do not adjust loans or rebalance portfolios in response to impact risk. In contrast to impact risk, dependency risk shows no significant effect on loan sales for either committed or non-committed banks.
Taken together, the findings suggest that committed lenders incorporate double materiality, while non-committed lenders focus solely on financial materiality. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study of the role of sustainability commitments in shaping lenders’ integration of biodiversity risks.
How to cite: Hajimirza, N., Asgharian, H., Jonsson, S., and Liu, L.: Biodiversity risks and lender credit allocation: The role of lenders’ commitments to environmental sustainability, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-425, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-425, 2026.
Biodiversity finance is emerging as a critical component of sustainable finance frameworks, yet the
allocation of responsibility within financial institutions remains conceptually and operationally
underdeveloped. While financial actors have long been perceived as causally distant from
environmental harm, this assumption is increasingly challenged as biodiversity loss generates
physical, regulatory, transition, and systemic risks. Recent regulatory developments in the EU, and
evolving approaches to nature-related risk assessment, signal a shift from voluntary stewardship
toward more binding expectations, even though uptake and acceptance—witness the debate
around the CSDDD—remain highly contested. These developments raise fundamental questions
about how financial institutions should operationalise biodiversity-related accountability, assess
nature dependencies, and embed ecological value in financial decision-making and long-term value
creation.
This paper examines these shifts through an interdisciplinary and practice-informed analysis. It is coauthored
with a practitioner who has been closely involved in developing sustainability-linked
financing instruments within a global financial institution. Pairing insider experience with a valuesbased
ethical perspective, the paper offers a grounded account of how regulatory expectations,
fiduciary mandates, disclosure obligations, and emerging biodiversity frameworks are interpreted
and negotiated within daily financial operations. Drawing on insights from ethics, corporate social
responsibility, and organisational practice, we explore how financial institutions can meaningfully
shape biodiversity-positive markets by integrating biodiversity risks and impacts into lending,
underwriting, and investment screening.
Using this unique practice-and-values methodology, we evaluate the potential of emerging
mechanisms such as nature credits, taxonomies, biodiversity KPIs, transition plans and disclosure
frameworks. We assess how tensions between financial logics, risk-based approaches, and ecological
realities shape implementation. Particular attention is given to where responsibility sits across
governance structures, risk teams, and external partnerships (e.g. bank-client relationships), as well
as how duty-based approaches intersect with market-led mechanisms.
By bridging theoretical scholarship, evolving policymaking, and practitioner insights, the paper aims
to advance dialogue on how biodiversity finance can move beyond symbolic compliance toward
transformative financial practice with an impact on the real economy. Our contribution seeks to
support scholars, policymakers, and industry actors working to align capital flows with ecologically
viable and ethically just futures.
How to cite: Mees, R. and De Bruin, B.: Biodiversity Obligations in Financial Decision-Making – From Principle to Operation, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-535, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-535, 2026.
Grasslands cover over 40% of Earth’s land surface and hold more than 30% of terrestrial carbon stocks, yet remain dramatically underrepresented in global biodiversity finance. These working landscapes—home to over one billion people and critical to food, water, and climate stability—are also among the most degraded.
Because grasslands respond quickly to improved management, regenerative stewardship offers one of the most under-utilized, scalable, cost-effective, rapid-impact opportunities to generate measurable gains in biodiversity, carbon, and rural livelihoods. Few ecosystems can deliver such a fast ecological response alongside long-term systemic transformation.
The Savory Foundation, in partnership with the Savory Institute and its global network of regional Hubs, is pioneering a nature-based investment model centering ecosystem service generation—including soil carbon sequestration and biodiversity recovery—as a bankable asset. Using the Savory Institute’s Holistic Management framework and Ecological Outcome Verification (EOV) protocol, supported by third-party MMRV (measure, monitor, report, verify) through Perennial Earth, we transparently track ecological improvements across landscapes managed by farmers, herders, and pastoralists. In partnership with Blue Green Future, we are building the global infrastructure needed to scale this solution through finance, policy, and place-based implementation.
This abstract presents our integrated approach to large-scale grassland regeneration and outlines how we are structuring investable financial instruments—including premium soil carbon credits and nature-positive outcome units—that align ecological integrity with long-term financial return. With pilot projects already underway in Uruguay, the Iberian Peninsula, and East Africa, and an emerging Buffalo Nation Fund (BNF) program on US-based Tribal lands, we offer a real-world pathway to link biodiversity and carbon markets to land regeneration at scale. Crucially, our model ensures that land stewards—often Indigenous or rural communities—are the primary beneficiaries, through direct payments, capacity-building, and market access.
By quantifying ecological value, embedding transparent monitoring, and aligning incentives across investors, landowners, and market systems, this model represents a replicable mechanism to redirect capital flows toward regenerative land-use. Partners like PwC are advancing efforts to integrate biodiversity metrics into mainstream investment decisions. We are proposing grassland-based nature credits as a missing but essential asset class within biodiversity finance—capable of delivering measurable co-benefits across all pillars of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
How to cite: Ibarra-Howell, D., Howe, W., and Chami, R.: Regenerating Grasslands as a Scalable Nature Credit Asset: Integrating Ecological Value into Biodiversity-Aligned Investment, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-868, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-868, 2026.
Nature-related risks are increasing worldwide due to unprecedented impacts of human activities on the natural environment. While, the occurrence of extreme weather events or natural disasters hits society and the economy, the subsequent behaviour of affected individuals or organizations in turn affects the likelihood of future nature-related risks materializing. Firms are at the centre of this nature-related risks cycles with their exposure to the materialization of nature-related risks and their own impacts on the environment. Understanding their reactions towards extreme weather events and natural disasters is key, if we are to combat climate change and nature loss effectively and support firms in their adaptation and mitigation strategies. In this paper, we analyse how firms respond to extreme weather events or natural disasters and distinguish two types of nature-related risks: chronic physical risk in the form of droughts and acute physical risks in the form of hurricanes. We assess firms’ reactions to these events through their polluting behaviour based on site-specific information on chemical waste from the U.S. Toxic Releases Inventory (TRI) Programme. Our findings show that the effect of severe droughts on chemical waste is marginal and that there is no effect of hurricanes on sites that are directly on the hurricane route. However, we observe strong shifts in polluting behaviour. Firms tend to shift from offsite waste to onsite waste during extreme droughts. This offsite waste is more often released rather than being recovered or recycled. Sites that are in the vicinity of the hurricane tend to increase their pollution. Our results suggest that on average firms tend to increase pollution after experiencing extreme weather events or natural disasters. Firms tend not to reconsider their activities and rather increase externalities that in turn support future extreme weather events of natural disasters. Our results are important for insurance companies and investors that wish to price nature-related physical risks and for central banks and regulators that seek to understand cycles of nature-related physical risks.
How to cite: Olivito, S. and Ruffing-Straube, P.: The impacts of nature-related risks on corporate chemical waste , World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-267, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-267, 2026.
As public authorities set ambitious targets for wind energy and expedite its supply as a strategic resource for energy transition and security, the negative impacts on birds compound, and financing mitigation becomes a material barrier to bankability.
Development Finance Institutions have a history of measuring and mitigating wind energy project impacts in portfolios (mainly collision and electrocution) on birds. These institutions are increasingly adopting a cumulative lens, mapping how project impacts synergise. While successful mitigation determines access to capital for developers, the current project finance structures cannot absorb cumulative externalities. The first step in demystifying the mitigation – finance axis is accounting for impact on regional scales so that the cost can be correctly attributed and accumulated risk can be managed.
A Cumulative Impact Area of 70000 km2 in the Aegean Region of Türkiye was designated. Vantage Point surveys and Collision Risk Modelling were conducted at 11 wind farms between 2020-2024 in spring, summer and autumn. The sample capacity represented 17% of total installed capacity in the region. By extrapolating collision risk per unit of installed power, a stress-test scenario analysis of cumulative impacts based on two growth targets for the region (12 GW vs 18 GW) by 2035 was carried out. A qualitative appraisal of overhead lines (essential infrastructure) was also included to capture grid-related risks.
The results suggest 100 fatal large bodied bird turbine collisions annually for the sampled seasons which was extrapolated to between 200-300 for the two growth scenarios. Five bird species accounted for over 90% of the estimated risk. For overhead lines, the expected risk is at least equivalent to turbine associated risks but possibly more.
The study validates the understanding that while biodiversity losses due to each project can appear negligible, collectively they create significant systemic risk exposure for public authorities, financial institutions, and developers. Addressing this broad challenge will require bridging fragmented actors to shift from project or portfolio level compliance to regional risk-sharing. Demystifying cumulative impacts is the prerequisite for unlocking innovative finance solutions, such as wind energy specific biodiversity credits, offset schemes, or regional bonds targeting collision and electrocution risks.
How to cite: Demirhan, E. and Arikan, K. G.: From Compliance to Regional Risk-Sharing: Cumulative Biodiversity Impacts in Wind Energy, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-349, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-349, 2026.
Biodiversity loss is increasingly recognized as a source of material financial risk, yet the insurance sector remains underrepresented in biodiversity finance discussions compared to investment and credit instruments. This poster presents an applied case from Argentina that illustrates how insurance can operate as a biodiversity finance instrument by directly integrating ecological value into financial decision-making and risk transfer mechanisms.
Río Uruguay Seguros, a cooperative insurance company based in Argentina, developed—together with UNDP Argentina and the Government of the Province of Misiones—the world’s first insurance scheme specifically designed to protect the jaguar (Panthera onca), a keystone species essential for ecosystem integrity in the Atlantic Forest. The initiative addresses one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss in the region: human–wildlife conflict linked to livestock predation. Through insurance coverage that compensates producers for economic losses caused by jaguar attacks, the scheme reduces retaliatory killings and aligns local economic incentives with conservation objectives.
From the perspective of the insurance sector, this experience represents a shift from insurance as a passive risk absorber to insurance as an active enabler of biodiversity-positive outcomes. Ecological risk is explicitly incorporated into product design, underwriting criteria, and governance arrangements, linking biodiversity protection goals with financial protection for rural livelihoods. The scheme relies on multi-stakeholder coordination among insurers, public authorities, conservation organizations, and local communities, demonstrating how insurance can contribute to biodiversity outcomes while maintaining actuarial discipline and operational feasibility.
The case provides concrete insights into how insurers can translate ecological value into financial structures beyond traditional investment or blended finance mechanisms. It highlights the potential role of insurance within emerging biodiversity finance frameworks, particularly in high-biodiversity contexts where conservation challenges intersect with socio-economic vulnerability and limited access to risk management tools. The experience offers lessons on scalability, replicability, and the strategic positioning of the insurance sector within broader biodiversity and sustainability agendas.
How to cite: Gomez, M.: Insurance as a Biodiversity Finance Instrument: The Role of the Insurance Sector in Integrating Ecological Value into Financial Decision-Making through Jaguar Protection in Argentina, World Biodiversity Forum 2026, Davos, Switzerland, 14–19 Jun 2026, WBF2026-999, https://doi.org/10.5194/wbf2026-999, 2026.
