A global consensus now recognises biodiversity as equal to climate change in its importance to sustainable development. While multilateral development banks (MDBs) have developed a strong emphasis on climate change, how do they approach biodiversity as a new priority? Current literature on MDBs' approach to climate change is prolific, but scholarship on biodiversity is scarce. Here, we compare MDBs' climate and biodiversity efforts in order to identify differences, analyze causes, and ultimately propose ways for MDBs to prioritise biodiversity. Methodologically, we analyze MDB documents in the form of policies, high-level announcements, and strategies, in order to compare climate change and biodiversity across five aspects: Financing, policy, strategy, client requirements, and environmental reporting. Subsequently, we apply automated text analysis to examine mentions of climate change and biodiversity in annual reports. Focusing on the 10 largest MDBs, we find that across all five aspects, MDBs' prioritisation of biodiversity lags far behind that of climate change. From that, we recommend that biodiversity be prioritised by MDBs in three ways: By adopting an integrated strategic approach to environmental issues that goes beyond climate, by not only addressing biodiversity through safeguards but also through labeled projects, and by assigning targets as proportions of total financing.
Policy Implications
- Biodiversity should be part of an integrated strategic approach to environmental issues that go beyond climate. This means greater integration of biodiversity and climate ambitions beyond the current levels. As climate issues continue to be prioritised by MDBs, tying biodiversity to this can increase its emphasis. For example, where the analysis above shows a clear split between climate and biodiversity in policy and strategy documents, integrating the two can help biodiversity become less long-term and abstract and more short-term and concrete.
- Biodiversity should not only be addressed through safeguards but also be addressed labelled projects. Becoming a project category of its own provides a prerequisite for targeted efforts rather than addressing biodiversity as a co-benefit of achieving other objectives. However, this is made difficult by the lack of revenue-stream mentioned above. Such labelling should not be exclusive by labelling projects as either contributing to climate or biodiversity but should allow for projects to be labelled as both at the same time.
- Based on the above recommendations of integration and labelling, MDBs should assign financing targets to biodiversity. This can be carried out in the same way as for climate finance today, including short- and medium-term targets, annual disclosure on progress towards targets and justification for how targets are in line with the Glasgow commitments. Ultimately, these three recommendations allow biodiversity to become a central priority within a short time frame rather than undergo the same gradual prioritisation trajectory over 20 years as seen with climate change.
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