How can the UK implement the Global Biodiversity Framework’s finance goals?

the challenge

Finance is a major driver of biodiversity loss. It also has the potential to be a powerful lever for delivering nature-positive outcomes. 

However, a significant nature-finance gap remains. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework highlights the need to reduce harmful subsidies, improve how financial institutions account for their impacts on nature, and increase investment in nature recovery. 

Achieving this requires both “greening finance” and “financing green”. Yet there is limited evidence on how these approaches can be implemented effectively in practice. 

This creates a challenge for policymakers, including Defra. There is a need for clear, actionable insights to align UK financial flows with biodiversity goals and international commitments. 

At the same time, the policy landscape is evolving rapidly. New mechanisms, such as the proposed Nature Restoration Fund, signal a shift towards more strategic, landscape-scale approaches. While this creates opportunities, it also introduces risks. Poor design or implementation could lead to unintended consequences and undermine biodiversity outcomes. 

The challenge for the Sprint was therefore to generate policy-relevant evidence on how to reduce the biodiversity impacts of financial flows, mobilise private investment, and ensure that interventions work together coherently at scale.

the solutions

The Sprint delivered a set of integrated tools and insights to support policymakers in aligning financial systems with biodiversity outcomes. By combining detailed data analysis with stakeholder engagement and policy design, the team delivered the following: 

• A granular methodology to quantify biodiversity impacts of financial flows, linking investments from UK banks to ecosystem vulnerabilities across regions and supply chains.  

• A high-resolution dataset using financial data from six UK banks to support targeted regulatory interventions under the “greening finance” agenda.  

• The world’s largest database of nature restoration funds, providing new evidence on how such mechanisms operate globally.  

• Empirical insights into nature markets, including incentive structures, governance models, and cost dynamics.  

• Practical recommendations to help inform the implementation of the UK’s Nature Restoration Fund, including approaches to metrics, risk-sharing, and alignment with Local Nature Recovery Strategies.  

Together, these outputs provided clearer and actionable evidence for how financial and policy interventions can be designed and implemented in practice. 

The work also showed that UK financial flows contribute to biodiversity loss internationally, highlighting the need for coordinated regulation, improved disclosure, and stronger policy alignment. It identified trade-offs within emerging biodiversity markets, demonstrating that effective design must balance inclusivity with strategic coordination at scale.

the pathway

The Sprint followed an interdisciplinary pathway designed to connect analytical rigour with real-world policy application. It combined quantitative modelling with qualitative and participatory approaches to ensure outputs were both robust and usable. 

The work began with high-resolution financial data, including loans, bonds, and equity investments. These were combined with ecosystem service vulnerability models to identify how financial flows interact with biodiversity risks. This provided a strong evidence base for understanding nature-related dependencies within financial systems. 

Building on this, the Sprint examined how nature-positive finance could be scaled. This included mapping incentives, costs, and governance structures within emerging nature markets. Stakeholder engagement in Oxfordshire and analysis of international restoration funds ensured that insights were grounded in practice. 

These findings were then applied to live policy development. In particular, they have helped to shape plans for the implementation of the UK’s proposed Nature Restoration Fund. 

Finally, participatory scenario workshops brought together stakeholders to explore how different policy and financial interventions could work in combination. This helped identify coherent, landscape-scale approaches to delivering biodiversity outcomes. 

This pathway ensured that evidence generation, stakeholder engagement, and policy design were closely integrated throughout. 

what happened next?

Following the Sprint, one member of the team is now part of the Nature Restoration Fund’s scientific advisory team. Engagement with local finance market stakeholders through another Sprint member’s DPhil linked with the Oxfordshire Local Nature Partnership aims to inform a more equity-centric framework for collaborative and strategic nature recovery. While international uptake remains dependent on wider geopolitical factors, the Sprint has established a strong foundation for future progress. The approach has clear potential to inform biodiversity finance policy in other national contexts as similar frameworks are developed.