It’s a truism that our efforts to drive catalytic change must move faster than the threats we face. 2024 has been a challenging year for those working towards a more just and sustainable financial and economic system — with temperature increases pushing the world towards increasingly unsafe levels of warming, political shifts creating new challenges for solidarity and multilateralism, and financing commitments at both COPs falling far short of what vulnerable countries and populations need to confront the nature and climate crises.
And yet, 2024 was also a year of undeniable progress in advancing the nature finance agenda. From the launch of the TNFD framework, to groundbreaking commitments at the G20 on best practices for the bioeconomy, to important agreements on the equitable use of biological data and Indigenous representation at the UN Nature COP in Colombia, to new standards and ways of valuing and measuring nature, we’ve made important strides.
Various civil society actors developed new standards to help accelerate sovereign debt conversions for nature and climate, and the International Advisory Panel on Biocredits (IAPB) released its eagerly awaited framework for advancing principles-based, high integrity, and impactful biodiversity credit markets.
There is of course, much more to recount and NatureFinance—in partnership with many others—has been part of many of these developments, releasing new tools, convening stakeholders, undertaking research and piloting new instruments to align finance with an economy that works for nature, climate and people.
