by Tom Picken (Rainforest Action Network)
Four years ago, governments gathered to adopt the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and committed, under Target 14, to progressively align public and private financial flows with its goals and targets. The Global Report poses an inconvenient question for Parties: where, exactly, are the rules to make that happen?
A new assessment, to be released today by the Forests & Finance Coalition, finds that, across 11 of the world’s most strategically important financial jurisdictions, the answer is, largely, nowhere.
The report Regulating Finance for Biodiversity: An Assessment for the Global Biodiversity Framework 2026, reviewed financial regulation in Brazil, Canada, the Central African Economic and Monetary Community, China, the European Union, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The analysis looks more deeply into why Target 14 is off-track, testing whether financial sector regulations have elements capable of delivering key GBF targets. Of 33 detailed assessments across the 11 jurisdictions, 30 landed in the red or dark red categories, with just three scoring a yellow partial score. Not one jurisdiction prohibits banks and investors from financing companies involved in deforestation or the conversion of natural ecosystems.
While there has been some observed progress on disclosure and taxonomies, there are no requirements on financial institutions to address their disclosed impacts nor are there mandates to ensure portfolio alignment with emerging taxonomy classifications.
This is particularly worrying given the increasing amounts of finance going into forest-risk sectors. Forests & Finance has conservatively identified USD $894 billion in forest-risk-adjusted loans and underwri-ting to just 500 assessed companies involved in forest-risk commodities and metal and mineral mining between January 2016 and September 2026, including USD $595 billion since 2020. That is a lot of biodiversity-impacting finance left untouched.
If Target 14 is to mean anything, governments need to rapidly scale up efforts to address harmful subsidies and to regulate financial flows driving biodiversity loss.
That means measuring and understanding the scale of these differentiated flows, mandatory due diligence for finance linked to deforestation and ecosystem conversion, biodiversity criteria in prudential regulation and central-bank operations, and time-bound targets for aligning portfolios with the Global Biodiversity Framework.
And because there is no just transition without justice, subsidy reforms and financial sector regulations must be designed to support and protect Indigenous Peoples and local communities, women, workers and other stakeholders, with meaningful sanctions and remedy obligations when financial institutions fail to comply.
There is still time to start making Target 14 real. But if governments continue to leave the financial system largely free to fund the destruction that the CBD is trying to stop, they should not be surprised when the numbers refuse to add up. Conservation finance will never be able to mop up the damage while the bulk of forest finance keeps driving harm.
For more information see https://forestsandfinance.org/