Closing the Gaps in the Global Biodiversity Framework Implementation
Launched ahead of COP17 at PRI In-Person 2026, this new brief – developed by a number of organisations that work closely with investors – analyses how more than 800 global investors are acting on nature and biodiversity in line with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF), and where policy can unlock more action. With COP17 offering a critical opportunity to align priority actions, this brief provides recommendations that can help reduce nature-related risks to economies and financial systems and support long-term prosperity.
provides policymakers with insights into how they can create enabling conditions for institutional investors to align private capital with the KMGBF at scale. In doing so, they can help close current implementation gaps of the framework and address escalating nature-related risks to economies around the world.
Aligning financial flows with the goals of the KMGBF is essential to reducing nature-related financial risks and supporting the scale of capital required to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, while supporting economic and social prosperity.
This brief analyses the actions that more than 800 investors are taking to address nature and biodiversity risk. It highlights investor progress and gaps in helping achieve the framework’s goals. It also demonstrates the significant opportunity that policymakers have to unlock greater private finance and accelerate the transition to a global economy that safeguards nature.
Key takeaways
- Institutional investors have a critical role to play in meeting global biodiversity goals. Escalating nature and biodiversity loss present a material and systemic financial risk. Managing financially material nature-related risks falls within the scope of investors’ fiduciary duties. Key targets of the KMGBF cannot be met without the private sector.
- Investors are stepping up and taking action. Institutional investors are assessing and disclosing nature-related risks, integrating biodiversity into investment policies, engaging the companies they invest in, and advocating for policy reform. More than 400 institutional investors with $60 trillion in assets under management have engaged over 300 companies to address nature-related risks, while over 160 investors have advocated for enabling policy including the EU Deforestation Regulation.
- Voluntary action alone cannot close the gap. Policy gaps continue to limit the private sector’s ability to meet targets, and corporate progress is not moving at the pace the challenge requires. Lack of comparable data, coherent policy, and aligned economic incentives remain the main barriers to progress.
- Policy actions are needed to further enable investor contributions. To align capital with the KMGBF at scale, investors need National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans they can rely on, regulatory certainty and coherence across jurisdictions, comparable disclosure data, public finance and subsidies that reward rather than penalise nature-positive activity, and structured dialogues to inform policy design.
It is critical for governments to agree on a set of clear, practical, and dedicated actions that can accelerate KMGBF implementation over the remainder of the decade and that can be integrated into their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans, the main national implementation mechanism for the framework.