by Laurel Sutherlin (Rainforest Action Network)
Attention, COP17 delegates: a new species has been spotted in the halls of the CBD. Actually, several of them. They travel in flocks, turn up reliably in policy discussions, and have developed an impressive array of songs, ranging from “mobilization” and “de-risking” to “investability” and “innovative finance”. They are, of course, the familiar narratives of biodiversity finance.
For a limited time only, you may soon encounter some of them in physical form, thanks to Rainforest Action Network’s Illustrated Field Guide to Biodiversity Finance Narratives, which is being passed around COP17 as a deliberately different kind of intervention in the biodiversity finance conversation. The ‘Field Guide’ is a somewhat cheeky, but fundamentally serious, invitation to rethink some of the dominant narratives wea-ving through current policy discourse, and to look beyond some familiar buzz words towards some of the deeper questions they may be obscuring.
The guide is based on the recognition that biodiversity finance is still too often reduced to how we can mobilize more money for nature. When conjuring up the next financial instrument, it is worth asking what the money in play is already doing, who is setting the rules governing it, and which unspoken assumptions are being allowed to determine what counts as a “solution”.
The field guide, modeled in a Victorian-era naturalist aesthetic style, introduces nine familiar “species” that populate biodiversity finance debates, including the Gap Warbler, Mobilization Magpie, Disclosure Owl and Debt-Swap Kingfisher. Each artistically illustrated card examines why a particular narrative is so appealing, what it might be covering up, and what other questions policymakers should be asking before allowing the narrative to fly away with the conversation.
Take the familiar claim that there is simply “no public money” available for biodiversity. Or the increasingly common assumption that private capital is the only realistic route to closing the finance gap. Or the proposition that better disclosure will, by itself, cause markets to change. These ideas may contain elements of truth, and some financial instruments may have a useful role, but they can also narrow the policy space by making certain approaches seem inevitable while leaving other questions off the table.
Attention, COP17 delegates: a new species has been spotted in the halls of the CBD. Actually, several of them. They travel in flocks, turn up reliably in policy discussions, and have developed an impressive array of songs, ranging from “mobilization” and “de-risking” to “investability” and “innovative finance”. They are, of course, the familiar narratives of biodiversity finance.
For a limited time only, you may soon encounter some of them in physical form, thanks to Rainforest Action Network’s Illustrated Field Guide to Biodiversity Finance Narratives, which is being passed around COP17 as a deliberately different kind of intervention in the biodiversity finance conversation. The ‘Field Guide’ is a somewhat cheeky, but fundamentally serious, invitation to rethink some of the dominant narratives wea-ving through current policy discourse, and to look beyond some familiar buzz words towards some of the deeper questions they may be obscuring.
The guide is based on the recognition that biodiversity finance is still too often reduced to how we can mobilize more money for nature. When conjuring up the next financial instrument, it is worth asking what the money in play is already doing, who is setting the rules governing it, and which unspoken assumptions are being allowed to determine what counts as a “solution”.
The field guide, modeled in a Victorian-era naturalist aesthetic style, introduces nine familiar “species” that populate biodiversity finance debates, including the Gap Warbler, Mobilization Magpie, Disclosure Owl and Debt-Swap Kingfisher. Each artistically illustrated card examines why a particular narrative is so appealing, what it might be covering up, and what other questions policymakers should be asking before allowing the narrative to fly away with the conversation.
Take the familiar claim that there is simply “no public money” available for biodiversity. Or the increasingly common assumption that private capital is the only realistic route to closing the finance gap. Or the proposition that better disclosure will, by itself, cause markets to change. These ideas may contain elements of truth, and some financial instruments may have a useful role, but they can also narrow the policy space by making certain approaches seem inevitable while leaving other questions off the table.
For example: if public and private financial flows vastly exceed the amounts currently being mobilized for bio-diversity, why is the conversation so often focused on finding new money rather than changing where existing money goes? If financial institutions are financing acti-vities that drive deforestation and ecosystem destruction, should the policy response really stop at asking them to disclose those risks? And if nature must become “investable” before it can attract capital, what happens to the values that cannot, or should not, be reduced to an investment opportunity?
These are not just semantic questions. The language used in these negotiations helps define the policies that are considered possible. The field guide invites dele-gates to turn the question around: not only how can biodiversity serve finance, but how can financial systems be made to serve biodiversity and the people who protect it?
That means looking beyond individual instruments to the rules, incentives and institutions shaping financial flows in the first place, including financial regulation, tax and debt reform, stronger public-interest institutions, protections for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and gender-responsive governance. It also means confron-ting the much larger financial flows driving biodiversity loss rather than assuming that additional conservation finance can somehow compensate for them.
So, as the biodiversity finance discussions continue, keep your eyes open. If you see a Gap Warbler fluttering through a panel discussion, a Mobilization Magpie collecting every shiny new financial instrument in sight, or a Disclosure Owl insisting that transparency is the destination rather than a means to accountability, the field guide may be useful.
The biodiversity finance debate does not suffer from a shortage of jargon, but sometimes it can suffer from a shortage of better questions.For example: if public and private financial flows vastly exceed the amounts currently being mobilized for bio-diversity, why is the conversation so often focused on finding new money rather than changing where existing money goes? If financial institutions are financing acti-vities that drive deforestation and ecosystem destruction, should the policy response really stop at asking them to disclose those risks? And if nature must become “investable” before it can attract capital, what happens to the values that cannot, or should not, be reduced to an investment opportunity?
These are not just semantic questions. The language used in these negotiations helps define the policies that are considered possible. The field guide invites dele-gates to turn the question around: not only how can biodiversity serve finance, but how can financial systems be made to serve biodiversity and the people who protect it?
That means looking beyond individual instruments to the rules, incentives and institutions shaping financial flows in the first place, including financial regulation, tax and debt reform, stronger public-interest institutions, protections for Indigenous Peoples’ rights and gender-responsive governance. It also means confron-ting the much larger financial flows driving biodiversity loss rather than assuming that additional conservation finance can somehow compensate for them.
So, as the biodiversity finance discussions continue, keep your eyes open. If you see a Gap Warbler fluttering through a panel discussion, a Mobilization Magpie collecting every shiny new financial instrument in sight, or a Disclosure Owl insisting that transparency is the destination rather than a means to accountability, the field guide may be useful.
The biodiversity finance debate does not suffer from a shortage of jargon, but sometimes it can suffer from a shortage of better questions.