Generating a national snapshot of all publicly-reported investments in ecosystem and species conservation across public, private, and philanthropic finance

With all of the intense policy action and rhetoric around upscaling private finance for nature and biodiversity at the moment, we wanted to conduct a reality check and assess all of the nature finance flows for which there was publicly available information in the UK, distinguishing between public, private, and philanthropic flows – both to try to get a balanced picture, and also to assess the quality of public disclosure and transparency. This is super critical because one of the main things that we’re worried about in biodiversity finance academia is the cannibalization of flows, where increases in, for example, private finance, instead of generating new and additional finance, might lead to reductions in public or philanthropic finance instead. If we take, for example, biodiversity credits, lots of the initial buyers of biodiversity credits have been philanthropic organizations who may previously have been donating to conservation, but simply without demanding a credit in return. So we’re pushing to view all nature finance flows in the context of each other, rather than just focusing on one set like private finance.

So we’re very excited to present our new preprint from the The Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery and Oxford’s Nature Positive Hub by Dr Alice Stuart and myself, Sophus zu Ermgassen: “Generating a national snapshot of all publicly-reported investments in ecosystem and species conservation across public, private, and philanthropic finance”:

There are some super interesting results in here:

• nature finance in the UK remains absolutely dominated by public finance. Agro-environment schemes and nature restoration grant programs are the dominant financial flows, and private finance remains marginal (at least the stuff that’s in the public domain)
• there are huge transparency issues around private finance that mean that actually getting ‘the number’ is impossible
• Philanthropy remains an absolutely giant driver of investment in conservation in the UK.
• we found evidence that public spending on nature through agri-environment schemes and grant programs is actually funded year-on-year through sovereign bonds. And this is super interesting because previously people have said that these kinds of spending are just public finance funded by taxpayers. If they’re funded by sovereign bonds instead, then actually these investments in nature *are* generating returns for investors who have bought sovereign bonds – with bondholders paid via taxation.