Executive Summary

This book considers the opportunities for scaling-up finance for biodiversity across six so-called “innovative financial mechanisms” as classified by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). These are: environmental fiscal reform payments for ecosystem services biodiversity offsets markets for green products biodiversity in climate change funding and biodiversity in international development finance. Drawing on literature and more than 40 case studies worldwide, the book addresses the following questions: What are these mechanisms and how do they work? How much finance have they mobilised and what potential is there to scale this up? And what are the key design and implementation issues – including environmental and social safeguards – that need to be addressed so that governments can help ensure these mechanisms are environmentally effective, economically efficient and distributionally equitable?