Nicholas Bruschi
Senior Policy Programme Manager
COP17 offers an opportunity to turn the Global Review into clearer national priorities, better-aligned finance and more decision-useful information.
When governments meet in Yerevan for CBD COP17, they will conduct the first Global Review of progress under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF). The Global Report prepared for that Review shows that implementation is not accelerating fast enough to meet the Framework’s 2030 targets.
This calls for urgency, but not pessimism. Governments, investors and businesses already have tools they can use to accelerate implementation.
A national implementation architecture
The pathway for action proposed for agreement in Yerevan should translate the Global Review’s findings into nationally owned action through 2030.
Governments could assess how their economies depend on ecosystems and the cascading risks created by degradation. Forests, soils, freshwater systems, wetlands and oceans support food production, water security, resilient supply chains and climate adaptation.
Integrating ecosystem dependencies and risks into national planning would help governments recognise healthy ecosystems as critical infrastructure rather than a peripheral environmental issue. Finance ministries could integrate these factors into national budgets, fiscal-risk assessments and public investment decisions.
National-level investment strategies can then translate these priorities into sector-specific and place-based programmes. These strategies should align with National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans, which set national biodiversity priorities, and National Biodiversity Finance Plans, which identify how to fund them.
These measures can give investors clearer policy signals and investment priorities, helping them assess material exposure to nature loss and identify opportunities to finance biodiversity protection and restoration. Investors, businesses, development banks and communities should be involved in developing these strategies and programmes. Investors can help identify the conditions needed to scale programmes successfully, while governments retain responsibility for national priorities and policy.
A finance architecture that delivers at scale
The challenge is not simply a shortage of financial instruments. National plans, Global Environment Facility (GEF) programmes, multilateral development bank (MDB) strategies and investment pipelines are often insufficiently coordinated. This can prevent promising projects from reaching the scale needed to attract institutional investment.
Scaling nature-positive investment will nevertheless have limited effect if wider public and private financial flows continue to reward nature loss. Harmful incentives distort prices, risks and returns, disadvantage more resilient business models and expose investors to abrupt repricing when policies change.
COP17 should encourage cross-ministerial processes to identify harmful incentives, prioritise them for reform and establish predictable, time-bound reform or repurposing plans. Investors and businesses can contribute evidence on competitiveness, supply-chain resilience and capital-allocation effects, while governments retain responsibility for reform.
Public finance should support environmental goods, including where commercial returns are insufficient to attract private investment. Development banks could help prepare and aggregate programmes and provide concessional finance where appropriate. Investors could contribute capital and market expertise where programmes offer credible governance, sufficient scale and an appropriate risk-return profile.
The Tropical Forest Forever Facility, launched at COP30 last year, illustrates one approach to combining sovereign support, institutional capital and results-based payments at ecosystem scale. COP17 offers an opportunity to strengthen coordination across existing institutions and financing mechanisms in support of country-led implementation.
An information architecture for accountable action
Investors require high-quality, decision-useful information to assess exposure to nature-related risks, inform stewardship and allocate capital. Governments, companies and investors all have a role in improving the evidence supporting those decisions.
Countries should publish decision-useful information on ecosystem dependencies, cascading economic risks and priority sectors and locations. This would inform policy, budgets, sector pathways and investment programmes.
The IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment can provide a shared evidence base on business impacts and dependencies, informing national policy, corporate transition planning and investor action.
Companies and investors should improve assessment, disclosure and transition planning, while contributing practical expertise on materiality, data usability and barriers to capital deployment. Greater interoperability between national requirements, TNFD recommendations and emerging ISSB approaches can reduce uncertainty and improve comparability without requiring identical systems.
COP17 can provide a practical course correction: a national implementation architecture that gives governments, companies and investors clearer direction; a finance architecture that aligns incentives and scales what works; and an information architecture that enables accountable decision-making.
We do not need to wait for perfect information, fully mature markets or complete global harmonisation before acting. Governments, investors and businesses can make progress now while reducing uncertainty, strengthening enabling conditions and scaling successful approaches.