April 4th, 2025
On April 4th, 2025, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and WWF International convened leaders for a meeting on ‘Sustainable Finance Solutions for Nature Conservation.’
The event brought together around ninety government, Multilateral Development Bank (MDB) and finance leaders from the Latin America region.
Julie McCarthy, NatureFinance CEO, delivered keynote remarks, reflecting on the future of nature positive finance, particularly at a time when the geopolitical context is demanding our most creative and determined thinking to make progress on finance for nature at scale.
According to the latest IPCC science, the global financial and economic system is currently aligned towards 2.5C-3C warming. 80 percent of the world’s leading climate scientists anticipate at least 2.5C of global heating by the end of the century, while almost half anticipate at least 3C.
With nature’s destruction being a key driver of the climate crisis, we know that nature-based solutions are to avoiding nature collapse and slowing runaway climate change. Nature positive finance sits at the heart of the mitigation, adaptation and resilience nexus. According to UNEP FI, close to $7 trillion per annum is currently directly destroying nature, with an additional unknown quantum of indirect costs. We must work at a systemic level to transform our financial and economic systems to become more nature positive.
In this keynote speech, Julie McCarthy touches upon:
- The historic sovereign debt crisis faced by low- and middle-income countries and its links to worsening climate and nature impacts.
- Mounting U.S.-driven tariff wars, G7 aid and concessionary lending rapidly decreasing, and the aggressive global backlash against ESG
- Rising South-South cooperation and multilateral and plurilateral leadership structures rapidly shifting into new configurations.
Given the above landscape, three focus areas are increasingly key to leading this transformation in the near to medium term:
(1) central banks and financial supervision,
(2) innovative finance that treats nature as a shock absorber and
(3) scaling the bioeconomy as a central feature of broader green economic transition.
