Tackling debt, biodiversity loss, and climate change
Losos, Elizabeth C. ; Pfaff, Alexander ; Pimm, Stuart L.
At the United Nations climate conference in late 2023, multilateral development banks and environmental institutions committed to raising the number, size, types, and effectiveness of funding mechanisms that support developing countries to address the interconnected crises of debt, climate, and biodiversity. A 'Task Force on Sustainability-Linked Sovereign Financing for Nature and Climate' will convene to establish a framework to ameliorate these crises by reforming debt-for-nature swaps-voluntary transactions in which creditors reduce or cancel debt in exchange for debtor-country commitments to fund specific environmental activities. We identify four reforms that should underpin the new framework: (i) Offer debt relief at a nationally consequential scale; (ii) defer to debtors on implementation to reduce transaction costs and raise debtors' benefits; (iii) employ performancelinked instruments based on reliable metrics to ensure global gains; and (iv) integrate all of those metrics across biodiversity conservation, emissions reduction, and climate adaptation to allocate funds most efficiently.</p>
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