Our natural world is out of order. Nearly a million species are at risk of extinction due to human
activity. The Amazon rainforest, the world’s coral reefs and the boreal forest biomes are all fast approaching the cusp of irreversible tipping points. It is time to ensure that efforts help reverse and not accelerate the looming planetary crises – climate change and nature loss – while also boosting sustainable job opportunities for communities.
While many governments and businesses realize that this presents a critical window of opportunity to take action, there is a need to increase the evidence base to enable governments to determine which pathways truly help the economic recovery process while equally addressing the global environmental agendas, helping to reduce nature loss and limit climate change, or at a minimum, not exacerbate them. For decades, addressing the negative environmental impacts of subsidies has remained at the bottom of action agendas in most countries, even as their governments made formal commitments and agreed on global targets to do so. Despite the urgent need to liberate funding to remedy recurring crises and finance response measures, countries have taken little action to redirect finances from environmentally harmful subsidies by reducing or redesigning them, even though there are small amounts of finance that provide positive incentives to biodiversity, they remain marginal.
In December 2022, at the 15th meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted and included Target 18.
This needs to be remedied in the coming decade as a matter of priority. To facilitate this process, The Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN) of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has developed these step-by-step guidelines to examine, repurpose, and monitor major subsidies to make them fiscally responsible and nature-positive. Since biodiversity is geographically specific and remains, to a large extent, unmeasured and undocumented, such an analysis is a complex task. These guidelines are a first attempt to facilitate the assessments of the impacts on nature from subsidies, using a broad definition encompassing all types of public support provided by governments. Using the guideline, countries can scan the full spectrum of their subsidies to determine to what extent they may be at risk of harming nature and create plans to redesign them to become more nature-positive. A people-centred approach is applied to prevent negative impacts on beneficiaries and enhance any positive impacts for both people and climate.
