Photo: N. Hällström

New financial needs assessment for biodiversity financing

SwedBio's director Maria Schultz, has been selected as one of five international experts to prepare the GEF-7 Financial Needs Assessment for the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Protocols.

The objective is to enable the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to make an assessment of the amount of funds that are necessary to assist developing countries and countries with economies in transition in fulfilling their commitments under the CBD and its Protocols over the seventh Global Environment Facility (GEF) replenishment cycle.

Maria Schultz was nominated by Sweden. The other members of the expert group are:

Mr. Carlos Manuel Rodriguez, nominated by the Government of Costa Rica, Vice President of Conservation Policy at Conservation International (CI);

Mr. Appukuttan Nair Damodaran, nominated by the Government of India, and a professor of economics and social sciences at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, India;

Mr. Yasushi Hibi, nominated by the Government of Japan, and the Vice President of Conservation International and Managing Director of Conservation International Japan; and

Mr. Günter Mitlacher, nominated by the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Network of the Global Environment Facility (known as the GEF-CSO Network), and is the WWF Focal Point for the CBD in Germany and the Global Focal Point for the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

SwedBio contributed to previous financial needs assessment under GEF

Maria Schultz was also one of five global experts performing a Financial Needs Assessment for GEF-6 Replenishment. The report was published in 2012 and can be downloaded from here.

Key results of the GEF-6 Financial Needs Assessment include:

The assessment of the Expert Team estimates that over the four‑year GEF-6 period (2014 – 2018) total funding needs of between approximately US$74 billion and US$191 billion would be required to contribute to achieve the Aichi Biodiversity Targets in GEF eligible countries, prior to taking into account GEF’s incremental reasoning and any co-financing. Further the assessment estimates that over the four-year GEF-6 period (2014-2018) the amounts needed will range between approximately US$35 billion and US$87 billion after applying incremental reasoning percentages between 10% and 100% according to global environmental benefits that the activities will potentially generate.
To calculate the amount needed for the GEF-6 replenishment during the period 2014-2018 the Expert Team applied three co-financing ratios (1:2, 1:4, and 1:6) to present options on the amount that may be required of the GEF Trust Fund to cover expected incremental costs. These amounts indicate GEF Trust Fund’s share that is expected for the sixth replenishment to leverage additional co-financing to ultimately meet the total funding needs respectively, depending upon a number of factors as elaborated in the methodology. GEF’s current average co-financing ratio for the Biodiversity Focal Area is 1:4. Given the fact that the co-financing ratio is subject to possible negotiations and hence cannot be predicted a lower (1:2) and higher (1:6) co-financing ratio was presented alternatively.