Journal article
The current state, opportunities and challenges for upscaling private investment in biodiversity in Europe
- Abstract:
- European countries have committed to ambitious upscaling of privately funded nature conservation. We review the status and drivers of biodiversity finance in Europe. By implementing semistructured interviews with 25 biodiversity finance key informants and three focus groups across Europe, we explore opportunities and challenges for upscaling private investment in nature. Opportunities arise from macroeconomic and regulatory changes, along with various technological and financial innovations and growing professional experience. However, persistent barriers to upscaling include the ongoing lack of highly profitable investment opportunities and the multitude of risks facing investors, including political, ecological and reputational risks influencing supply and demand of investment opportunities. Public policy plays the foundational role in creating and hindering these mechanisms. Public policy can create nature markets and investment opportunities, meanwhile agricultural subsidies and poor coordination between public funding sources undermine the supply of return-seeking investment opportunities. Investors demand derisking investments from uncertainties; in part caused by political uncertainty. These markets require profound state intervention to enable upscaling whilst achieving positive ecological outcomes; private investment will probably not upscale without major public policy change and public investment.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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- Files:
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 3.4MB, Terms of use)
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(Preview, Supplementary materials, pdf, 514.4KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1038/s41559-024-02632-0
Authors
- Publisher:
- Springer Nature
- Journal:
- Nature Ecology and Evolution More from this journal
- Volume:
- 9
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 515–524
- Place of publication:
- England
- Publication date:
- 2025-02-05
- Acceptance date:
- 2024-12-18
- DOI:
- EISSN:
-
2397-334X
- Pmid:
-
39910373
- Language:
-
English
- Pubs id:
-
2084425
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2084425
- Deposit date:
-
2025-02-09
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- zu Ermgassen et al
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © 2025 The Authors. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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