Resource description:
Nature (positive) finance is often narrowly perceived only as nature conservation finance, or ‘financing green’ with low financial returns, making it unsuitable and unattractive for private commercial capital at scale.
In this primer, we show that nature recovery finance or ‘greening finance’ to avoid and minimise harm to nature, as well as restoring nature to no net loss, can happen today and at scale with existing private commercial capital, through the everyday actions of financiers.
The primer identifies one prerequisite step and four levers of change that financial institutions can use to achieve this shift in mainstream finance. These are illustrated with a series of practical, current, concrete examples from financial institutions and other actors. These examples showcase existing approaches to using these levers of change and highlight their potential for scale:
The cumulative positive effects from incremental improvements have the potential to be significant and widespread due to the capacity for greening finance to scale up quickly. Our intention is that practitioners, equipped with this primer and the broad range of example actions it showcases, will be inspired and empowered to act for nature today through mainstream finance practice, whether working in a bank, investment firm or insurance company
Author/Contact:
Dr Corinne S Martin, Dr Jonathan Middleton, Dr Angela Small and Dr Nina Seega (CISL)