- From ambition to investment: Protecting and restoring nature requires clear, credible, and comparable metrics that translate ecological outcomes into finance-ready results, enabling investors and governments to scale nature-positive investments.
- Clarity unlocks capital: By simplifying the crowded landscape of nature metrics, the Financing Nature Guidance helps practitioners demonstrate impact, strengthen trust, and bridge the global biodiversity finance gap.
- IDB and EIB leadership: The IDB, together with the EIB and MDB partners, led the development of this Guidance, advancing MDB joint action on nature, and turning measurement into a catalyst for investment.
Protecting nature is one of the defining challenges — and opportunities — of our time. Conservation, restoration, and the sustainable use of ecosystems are not only a moral imperative; they are strategic investments in our shared future. Yet one fundamental truth remains: we cannot manage what we don’t measure, and we cannot finance what we cannot explain.
For governments, financial institutions, and practitioners leading nature-focused projects, demonstrating results is essential. But in a landscape crowded with hundreds of metrics, frameworks, and standards, identifying the right ones can be daunting. The complexity often slows investment, limits comparability, and makes it harder to communicate impact in a way investors understand and trust.
To address this challenge, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the European Investment Bank (EIB) on behalf of the Multilateral Development Banks Nature Working Group, led the development of the new knowledge product “Financing Nature: A Practitioner’s Guide to Results Metrics Selection” with technical support from The Biodiversity Consultancy. As a key deliverable of the MDBs’ Viewpoint Note, the Guidance helps translate nature ambition into measurable, credible, and finance-ready outcomes.
The global biodiversity finance gap is estimated at $711 billion per year (Paulson Institute, Financing Nature 2025). The resources currently available fall far short of what’s needed—not just to halt biodiversity loss, but to go further: to conserve, restore, and sustainably manage the natural systems that support our economies, livelihoods, and cultures.
Bridging this gap will require more than additional capital. It demands clarity and consistency in how results are measured and communicated.
This is where the Guidance makes a difference. It provides a clear, practical roadmap to help practitioners navigate the complex world of nature metrics and align them with the right financial instruments, ecosystems, and outcomes. When metrics are meaningful, they build confidence, attract capital, and make nature investments more scalable and impactful.
Developed collectively by MDBs and launched at UNFCCC COP30 in Belém, the Guidance delivers lines of action outlined in the MDBs’ Joint Action on Nature, People and Planet. It complements the Common Principles for Nature Finance Tracking and Taxonomy, which provides a toolkit to strengthen monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) and promote transparency across the nature finance ecosystem.
The Guidance is designed for project developers, governments, financial institutions, and conservation organizations seeking to design, monitor, and evaluate nature-positive investments. It helps users move from complexity to clarity through a simple two-step process:
- Define and assess the impact pathway. Clarify project objectives, identify IPBES drivers of nature loss, and map how specific actions lead to ecological outcomes.
- Select and apply the right metrics. Choose from Response, Pressure, and State metrics that best reflect the project’s context, data availability, and desired outcomes.
To support implementation, the Guidance includes:
- A core document with a metrics framework and appendices offering practical advice (e.g., on tech-enabled data collection).
- A spreadsheet toolkit with templates to support each step of the process.
- A library of case studies that demonstrates how the approach can be applied in different contexts.
The Guidance promotes metrics that:
- Avoid nature-washing by ensuring evidence-based claims.
- Align with leading standards such as Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures, Science Based Targets Network,International Finance Corporation, and International Capital Market Association.
- Measure outcomes, not just activities, emphasizing ecological change through state-of-nature metrics.
- Strengthen MRV systems with stronger data governance through external audits, traceability, community participation, and the use of open platforms and tech-enabled solutions.
- Link results to finance, bridging the gap between ecological outcomes and financial performance, and thus making nature finance more investable.
It is a voluntary, flexible, and user-oriented tool, applicable across asset classes (debt, equity, guarantees) and ecosystems (terrestrial, freshwater, marine). Whether you’re developing a biodiversity bond, a results-based finance scheme, or a restoration project, the Guide helps ensure that your metrics are credible, comparable, and aligned with frameworks such as the Global Biodiversity Framework.
By providing a common language between environmental practitioners and investors, this Guidance helps bridge the gap between nature ambition and financial action. It offers a structured pathway to design investments that are transparent, accountable, and truly nature positive.
The guidance is more than a reporting tool — it’s a strategic enabler. It empowers practitioners to build trust with partners, demonstrate impact with confidence, and scale up financing for nature where it’s needed most.
Protecting nature requires investment — and investment starts with measurement. This Guidance shows us how.
The Guidance was launched during a high-level session at COP30 in Belém, where representatives from governments and multilateral development banks highlighted the importance of having credible and comparable metrics to scale up nature finance. The session opened with keynote remarks by João Paulo Capobianco, Deputy Minister of the Environment and Climate Change of Brazil, and Ilan Goldfajn, President of the Inter-American Development Bank.
“MDBs are working as a system — using common principles, shared data, and real pilots to bring scale and credibility to nature finance. Because to protect nature, we must invest in it. And to invest, we must measure. This Guidance shows us how,” said IDB President Ilan Goldfajn during the launch event.
André Aquino, Head of the Economics and Environment Advisory Office at Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, moderated the event and led a panel discussion with Richard Amor, Director of Partnerships for EIB Global, Ruth Davis, UK Special Representative for Nature, and José Ricardo Sasseron, Vice President for Government Business and Corporate Sustainability at Banco do Brasil.
The session concluded with closing remarks by Yoko Watanabe, Director of Environment at the Asian Development Bank, speaking on behalf of the MDB Working Group on Nature and its Joint Action on Nature Finance. Across the interventions, speakers emphasized that advancing credible measurement frameworks is key to mobilizing larger and more effective flows of nature finance.