The United Nation’s environment watchdog has said that to guard Earth’s ecosystems against the rising threat of climate change and a loss of natural resources, funds towards its protection need to double from current levels and reach $384 billion a year by 2025.
The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) second “State of Finance for Nature” report shows that currently, $154 billion yearly is spent, primarily by governments, towards “nature-based solutions” or the protection and management of water, land, air and wildlife.
In his reaction, Ivo Mulder, head of UNEP’s climate finance unit, said that this amount “will have to increase by several orders of magnitude if we are to tackle the triple crisis of land degradation, climate and nature.”
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Continuing, he said, “even if we are going through many crises, like the war in Ukraine and skyrocketing prices, “It shouldn’t be too hard a stretch given that almost 50 per cent of global GDP is dependent on healthy and well-functioning ecosystems.”
According to the agency’s assessment, governments spend $500 billion to $1 trillion per year on subsidies for fisheries, agriculture, and fossil fuels, which could have negative environmental effects.
However, private sector actors only account for 17 per cent of investment in nature-based solutions, despite their pledges to reduce carbon emissions and deforestation and this means that they will have to combine net zero with nature positive.
Story was adapted from Wion.
