Private finance will be among the most important factors to achieving global nature protection goals by 2030. A standalone nature standard could be the most important piece of the puzzle. The ‘biodiversity COP’ this October is our next best chance to fight for this outcome.

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Contents

1. A radical revaluation
2. Correcting the ISSB’s nature gamble

How far have we come in our efforts to restore nature?

This will be the focus of the 17th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, or ‘biodiversity COP’, to be held in three months’ time in Yerevan, Armenia.

A top agenda item at COP17 will be the first formal review of progress towards the goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), agreed in 2022. This includes restoring 30% of the world’s degraded ecosystems and conserving 30% of its lands, waters and seas by 2030.

It is an heroic goal, pinned down by a more practical yet equally daunting challenge: how to mobilise finance to the goal of nature repair and regeneration.

We remain far from the mark. According to the latest UNEP ‘State of Finance for Nature’ report, to meet the GBF goals the world needs to more than double current annual investment in nature-based solutions (NbS) to US$571 billion by 2030.

We must also cut the flow of money towards projects that harm natural ecosystems. At US$7.3 trillion in 2023, those flows are thirty times larger than nature-positive finance flows.

Source: UNEP, 2026. State of Finance for Nature 2026.

The UNEP figures also show a perverse imbalance: private capital contributes just over 10% of global NbS investment but makes up almost 70% of all nature-negative finance.

We cannot achieve the GBF vision without a radically new investment thesis, which UNEP says will require regulatory change and better-informed private capital allocation.

On this latter point, at least, the last three years may give us cause for optimism.

A radical revaluation

Before 2023, most corporates treated ‘nature’ as a peripheral environmental issue: at best an externality that good corporate citizens could address if and when convenient.

But things have changed. Today, majorities in boards and C-suites (in Australia and globally) report grappling with their exposure to nature-related risks. Nature loss is now seen as a threat to global value chains, sovereign debt, and even international security. The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, one of the profession’s most prestigious credentialing bodies, now urges corporates to integrate biodiversity in scenario risk modelling, saying climate-only scenarios are no longer sufficient.

As nature loss has become accepted as a source of business risk, nature itself has taken on a new value: as infrastructure for resilience.

This revaluation is unlocking a wave of demand for nature-positive investments. A TNC/Forest Trends report released in June estimated the value of publicly announced forward investments in nature-related projects at US$183 billion, almost three times the amount deployed across the whole of the last decade. In this report and others, investors have cited risk mitigation and portfolio resilience as central to their emerging nature-positive investment thesis.

These are pledges, not capital deployed. Still, the trend matters, as it signals a confident new business case that wasn’t there before. If it holds, it could power the acceleration of nature-positive flows the GBF needs.

Correcting the ISSB’s nature gamble

Building on this momentum should be a priority for States Parties, business and civil society participants at COP17. The most powerful ‘push factor’ for greater private investment in nature is regulation: mandatory expectations backed by governments worldwide.

Against that backdrop, consider the decision of the International Sustainability Standards Board (ISSB) to prepare a non-mandatory nature Practice Statement.

The ISSB has committed to building on the work of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), whose recommendations have served as the world’s de facto natural capital disclosure standard since September 2023.

The TNFD has been the most important catalyst for that revaluation. Building on other global initiatives and decades of conservation science, the TNFD put nature-related risk into an informational architecture that business can act on; and it has nurtured a global implementation ecosystem, deepening the pool of resources for business to invest in measurable nature-positive solutions.

To date, more than 730 organisations have adopted the TNFD, representing over US$22 trillion in assets under management.

The ISSB’s initial announcement that it would create a reporting standard based on the TNFD was well received, because a global mandatory nature standard, an ‘IFRS S3’ to follow the IFRS S1 (general sustainability) and S2 (climate) standards, would give regulators around the world clear guidance and market actors an immediate signal.

A nature Practice Statement will fall far short of this mark. By the ISSB’s own telling, it is likely the Statement will be little more than an advisory addendum to IFRS S1: a standard treated as voluntary in many jurisdictions worldwide, including in Australia.

The ISSB plans to release an exposure draft of its Practice Statement in time for the conference. Given the finance-related priorities already slated for discussions at COP17, States Parties including Australia should make it a priority to convince the ISSB to change course. A robust standalone nature standard could be the most powerful lever we have to scale and entrench a radical revaluation of nature worldwide.

About the Author

Josue Castro is a Senior Strategy Manager and Nature Lead at BWD Strategic, with extensive experience in urban strategy, economic development, and geopolitics.