Biodiversity is experiencing a ‘financial crisis’, with an annual funding shortfall of $700 billion compared to what is required to achieve global targets. The Global Biodiversity Framework aims to increase annual biodiversity finance by $200 billion to help close this gap, through both the public and private sectors. Clearly, greater efforts are needed to finance biodiversity conservation and restoration, but of equal importance is addressing an array of counter-pressures associated with unjust financial and economic policies.

Join us for a discussion on this topic with Megan Evans (UNSW), Paul Elton (ANU), and Benjamin Thompson (Monash), who will also moderate the event. The session will be hosted by A/Professor Anita Foerster (Director, Green Lab).

We will examine these counter-pressures, including the high sovereign debt of biodiversity-rich countries which restricts their ability to spend public funds on biodiversity. This situation is exacerbated because most biodiversity finance is provided as loans which lead to further indebtedness.

Subsequently, we will discuss trends in the terminology and networks around biodiversity finance, highlighting a central group of powerful actors that drive this discourse and dictate funding flows. We will also reveal a disproportionately heavy focus on the private sector, relative to its potential to contribute significantly to biodiversity conservation and restoration.

Finally, we will give particular attention to the critical need to address harmful subsidies that contribute to environmental degradation – revealing the numbers behind harmful subsidies in Australia related to energy, transport, agriculture, fisheries, and forestry. We will conclude by considering the reforms necessary to reduce these counter-pressures.

Organisers

Monash Nature Positive Network and Green Lab, Impact Labs, Monash Business School.

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