High-Level Session on Financing Ecosystem Restoration to launch the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Investing in nature is an investment in the future. However, many countries are currently facing mounting debt crises and shrinking resources resulting from the COVID-19 economic downturn and spending on recovery efforts. We need both scaled up investment and financial innovations to bridge the public financing gap for investment in nature-based solutions (NBS) to address the climate and biodiversity crises and deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals.

Fiscal instruments can help close this financing gap by making better use of resources by creating incentives that direct development and COVID recovery onto a more sustainable path without diverting large amounts of public funds or increasing public debt. Through subsidy reform and innovative tax incentives, governments can create incentives that prioritize green growth, sustainable global value chains, improved management of forests, and restoration of degraded land- and sea-scapes. Policy makers can use fiscal reform to create better incentives for the private sector to co-invest in forest conservation and restoration. By improving fiscal incentives, first the economy-wide cost of sustainability transitions falls and second the private sector shoulders a greater share of financing needs for those transitions. Both effects are key to reducing the public financing gap for restoration and other sustainable development goals.

This session brought together investment banks, government officials, private sector companies engaged in activities that impact land use and policy experts to discuss innovations in financing and fiscal incentives that have the potential to transform landscapes through restoration, improved land use practices and sustainable commodity supply chains.