Integrating biodiversity into financial decision-making: Challenges and four principles

Many financing decisions continue to exacerbate global biodiversity loss, despite a growing understanding of the economic and financial risks of biodiversity loss. Applying Coase's financial decision-making theory based on cost, revenues, and risks, the article analyzes literature and current developments of biodiversity finance and green finance to evaluate why financial decision-making is incentivized to ignore biodiversity risks and mostly fails to maximize biodiversity conservation or nature-positive finance. Based on the identified gaps, the article develops four principles to integrate biodiversity into financial decision-making: (1) regulation must set limits on nature's exploitation, as finance only values limited aspects of nature as "bankable," while the destruction of other parts are without negative or positive value to the investor; (2) biodiversity-related financial risk evaluation needs focus on local risks due to the local nature of biodiversity impacts and dependencies (in comparison, e.g., to climate finance's global risks); (3) scale biodiversity finance utilizing its secondary benefits, particularly in conjunction with climate finance; (4) biodiversity finance development needs to be co-led and championed by financial decision-makers. This article contributes to the emerging literature on biodiversity finance and green finance for sustainable development with implications for policy makers and standard setters.