Nigeria’s Minister of Environment, Mohammed Abdullahi, has stated that if the public sector can provide the enabling environment through the necessary regulatory and policy frameworks, the gap in biodiversity financing can be closed.
Abdullahi stated at the just concluded United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) which ended in Montreal, Canada, about a fortnight ago on December 19, 2022 with a landmark agreement to guide global action on nature up until 2030.
He stated: “A composite set of solutions involving different players are needed in mobilizing financial resources at scale for biodiversity.
“While all sectoral entities with the capacity to provide international public finance, particularly the private and financial sectors, have a role to play in galvanizing support for actions in developing countries to achieve global targets, the public sector, must take the bull by the horns by providing the enabling environment with necessary regulatory and policy frameworks, scaling up nature-positive incentives, providing data and concessional finance, creating investment opportunities, ending, reviewing, or redirecting all national subsidies that are harmful to biodiversity, facilitating the alignment of financial flows, and strengthening synergies to address the triple planetary crises of biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution.
“This will go a long way in closing the biodiversity finance gap by reducing the pressure on biodiversity and consequently reducing the required financing to protect, conserve, and restore.”
He added that “governments need to work with the private sector to better align private financial flows towards transforming economies to become resilient, climate-neutral, nature-positive and less polluting.
“For instance, in Nigeria, the tree planting initiative funded through National Appropriation, Sovereign Green Bond, and Private Sector has resulted in the successful afforestation, reforestation, and restoration of degraded lands, vulnerable sites and landscapes with over 20 million trees species and distribution of over 6,550,056 tree seedlings to sub-national governments and institutions.
“The crux of the whole issue is realigning investments aimed at directing financial flows away from projects with negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services to projects that mitigate negative impacts or pursue positive environmental impacts as a co-benefit.
“In engaging positively with nature, financial institutions can collaborate and join initiatives in favor of biodiversity, adapt their investment strategies and engage with companies, assess their risks, impacts, and dependencies, and set targets in line with global goals and the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, among others.”
