- The global loss of biodiversity is a pressing problem that scientists and economists warn could have disastrous repercussions for society.
- The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, signed in 2022, laid out a set of targets, including substantial increases in funding and ending subsidies that harm nature, to find ways to address and stem the loss.
- Since the signing of the agreement, financing aimed at catalyzing work to protect species by less-industrialized countries, as well as Indigenous communities, has been channeled through the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund.
- The fund has begun supporting projects around the world, even as the amounts committed from a handful of governments are a fraction of what researchers say is required to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.
Mexico’s sundry landscapes have few parallels. Straddling the northern boundary of the Tropic of Cancer, the country boasts low-lying deserts and humid rainforests, scrubby chaparral and tangled mangroves, with long spines of the Sierra Madre stitching the country’s starkly different biomes together.
Mexico is home to the third-most mammal species of any country and supports a whopping 864 species of reptiles, nearly half of which occur only within Mexico’s borders. What’s more, human culture is deeply intertwined with the natural world here, with known traditional uses for almost a quarter — some 5,000 species — of its plants.
“Mexico is a ‘megadiverse’ country,” Daniela Carrión, senior director of project design and oversight at the NGO Conservation International, tells Mongabay. The “megadiverse“ moniker is ascribed to 17 countries holding most of the world’s biodiversity. They typically have high levels of endemic species, plants in particular, that occur nowhere else on Earth.
Still, Carrión adds, Mexico “faces a lot of challenges that are similar to all countries in terms of land use options and climate change.” Deforestation for agriculture, as well as logging, water scarcity and sea level rise, all threaten to strain the country’s resilience.
The Mexican government has a long history of conservation, Carrión says, with recent moves to boost protected areas to 95 million hectares (235 million acres), covering 14% of the country’s land and a quarter of its seas and oceans by the end of 2024. But maintaining such large areas, which the country hopes to expand on the way to conserving 30% of its land and water by 2030, requires resources and capacity among government agencies, Indigenous stewards and local communities. So CONANP, the agency that manages the country’s network of protected areas, partnered with Conservation International and the nonprofit Mexican Fund for Nature Conservation to develop the Mex30x30 project. In 2024, Mex30x30 was awarded nearly $17 million for protected area management — one of the first projects supported by the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBF Fund).
Carrión says the infusion has added “a whole momentum” to ongoing improvements for Mexico’s protected area management.
The GBF Fund’s aim is to channel money from wealthy nations and private donors to less-industrialized countries to help achieve the targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) adopted at COP15, the 2022 United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity conference in Montreal. Experts say the GBF Fund could be effective in encouraging homegrown action like Mex30x30 — especially ones that directly address the GBF’s goals. One of the framework’s most prominent targets is the conservation of 30% of the world’s “land, waters and seas” by the next decade.
Success in these projects would send a signal to donor countries that “they are not wasting” their money, Ralf Buckley, an emeritus professor in environmental sustainability and management at Australia’s Griffith University, tells Mongabay in an email.
“The first projects that were approved under the [GBF Fund] have already begun to demonstrate results,” says Claude Gascon, interim CEO and director of strategy and operations at the Global Environment Facility (GEF), in an email to Mongabay. The GEF established and manages the GBF Fund.
Globally, wildlife species have been hit hard by human activities due to habitat loss, hunting and harvesting, disease, and invasive species. The 2024 “Living Planet” report by U.S.-based conservation NGO WWF found that average wildlife abundance declined by 73% from 1970 to 2020, based on numbers from more than 5,000 vertebrate species.
The 2022 Global Biodiversity Framework puts the amount of financing necessary to address this crisis at around $700 billion annually, either in direct financing or the reform of subsidies, such as those for fossil fuel extraction, that harm nature. COP15 delegates also set goals of $20 billion a year in flows of finance to “the least developed countries and small island states” by 2025 and $30 billion by 2030.
Meeting the need for those international flows is where the GBF Fund fits in. Since its launch, however, donors have only committed $386 million.
“It’s a small fraction” of the international finance target, says Mark Opel, finance lead for the Campaign for Nature, which advocates for 30×30. “But the hope would be that funding helps to catalyze increased domestic spending.”
That’s critical, Opel says, because most money going to conserve biodiversity in developing countries comes from national budgets, not international funding.
According to a December 2025 report, the much-publicized 30×30 global target had attracted $1.1 billion in funding by 2024, short of the $6 billion the authors say is needed annually by 2030 to succeed.
Though the GBF Fund is intended to shuttle money to the Global South, it attracted criticism at COP16, the 2024 U.N. biodiversity conference in Cali, Colombia, because some see the GEF, which is based at the World Bank, as favoring “developed country interests.”
There are also concerns about the relatively scant funding the GEF has managed to raise to date. India and Bangladesh have called the GEF’s procedures “cumbersome,” and called for “a transparent and inclusive mechanism,” according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.
The GEF, however, highlights the speedy approval of biodiversity-related projects. In addition to Mex30x30, the GBF Fund provided around $18 million for two projects in Brazil and $1.4 million for one project in Gabon in 2024. The council, which includes representation from 16 developing countries, released more funding for projects in 2025.
A late-2025 assessment revealed that the GEF has allocated $288.7 million of the $386 million pledged. As of November 2025, 11 countries and the Canadian province of Québec have pledged funds. The GEF now reports that 62 projects in 71 countries are underway. The GEF also highlights that 29% of funding is supporting the work of Indigenous peoples and local communities, topping the GBF Fund’s target of 20%.
The GBF Fund’s “inclusive governance structure and streamlined project process are the product of lessons learned over decades of working with recipient countries,” Gascon says.
But questions remain around how much the GBF Fund at current levels can do to address biodiversity loss alongside interlocking challenges like climate change, poverty and conflict.
Targeted support
In 2024, the GBF Fund also awarded $9 million to the Brazilian Biodiversity Fund (FUNBIO) in the first round of allocations for Brazil’s Indigenous biodiversity conservation project. The goal is to better support the communities that manage 15 areas included in the proposal across 6 million hectares (15 million acres) over the five-year project. Since beginning work in April 2025, the team has been on a mission to understand the vastly different contexts in which these communities live, says Fábio Leite, implementing agency coordinator at FUNBIO. They live in areas that range from the wetlands of the Pantanal to the “gigantic” Kayapó territory, covering an area larger than Iceland between the savannas of the Cerrado and the rainforests of the Amazon.
The first order of business has been making these communities aware that this support is available for protecting their territory and figuring out the best uses from their perspective, Leite says. They are not going in and telling them what FUNBIO believes is best.
“This never works,” Leite says. “Never, never works.
“Within Indigenous lands, every one is different from the others,” he adds. “You have to talk with each one of them.”
These communities have developed a set of environmental management plans. But Leite notes that even without these plans, the rate of deforestation on their lands is far lower than in other parts of Brazil.
Leite anticipates that the GBF Fund financing could help improve sustainable agroforestry methods, for example. The funds could also help communities keep watch over their territories — with drones, for example.
“We think this is a first step — almost a proof of concept that we can work with these organizations,” Leite says. Conservationists have learned that working with Indigenous peoples is a proven — and cost-effective — way to protect ecosystems.
“If you think about all the strategies you have to curb deforestation,” he adds, “it’s probably the cheapest solution we have out there. It’s cheaper than protected areas.”
The GBF Fund has also funded another project in Brazil to conserve the delicate dry forests of the Caatinga, as well as work in Central Africa’s Gabon to promote coexistence between people and wildlife. The GEF says these projects were approved less than a year after the fund’s launch.
Conservation International’s Carrión says the GEF has gotten requests to speed up funding and that the process has been “quite fast.”
Quality control
Amid the push to deliver decisions and funding more quickly, however, researchers argue that efforts still need to ensure that projects are actually making promised strides toward halting or reversing biodiversity loss, which often isn’t straightforward.
“Measuring effectiveness of spending is really challenging in biodiversity,” says Opel from Campaign for Nature. “It’s hard because nature is complex. It’s not as simple as carbon accounting. And even that isn’t simple.”
It’s important that streamlining approvals and allocation doesn’t come at the expense of project quality control — “the one element you don’t want to be shortened,” says Alice Hughes, an associate professor of biological sciences at Hong Kong University.
“One of my concerns in this space is often we measure progress by the amount of dollars on the table, not how effective they are,” she adds. In that circumstance, Hughes says, projects run the risk of overestimating “how well we are doing … without actually seeing how effective any initiative is.”
It’s understandable that funders want to be able to report achievements stemming from their contributions, she says. But the way the results are reported doesn’t always translate to positive biodiversity impacts.
Hughes points to forest restoration projects as an example.
“If success is the number of trees you planted, then it’s easy to reach success,” Hughes says. But many of those trees may die in the first years of a project, she says. Or, projects framed as restoration may involve plantations.
In another example, a 2015 study in the journal BioScience found that some 900 million hectares (2.22 billion acres) of grasslands and savannas had been flagged as potential sites for forest restoration. Hughes argues that those sorts of projects “are arguably negative for biodiversity because you’re just converting an ecosystem.”
She says a positive step recently was finalizing a “monitoring framework“ with hundreds of quantifiable indicators at the COP16 biodiversity conference in Cali in 2024. She also notes that the GEF has been involved in recent discussions with the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, an open-access repository for biodiversity data.
Hughes sees that as an acknowledgment that the GEF understands “we need to get better at ensuring that funding has impact.”
“But I think it’s too early to really say how effective that will be in the longer term,” she adds.
At this point, though, Nathalie Pettorelli, a conservation biologist and professor at the Zoological Society of London’s Institute of Zoology, agrees that adequate indicators and measurements are not yet in place. A quest focused solely on meeting headline goals could undermine the ability of this work to address dwindling wildlife populations and overall biodiversity loss, she says.
The 30×30 ambition is a potential example. An outsize focus on sheer protected area overall could sidestep indicators that measure true impact on biodiversity, such as the size of those individual conserved spaces, their resilience to climate change, and how well-connected they are.
“Everything is in the details,” she adds.
Hughes notes that the tendency as 2030 approaches may be to “diluted” definitions and indicators.
“If the only way we can reach these targets is by setting inappropriate indicators, or by having thresholds that are so low that it’s no longer meaningful,” Hughes says, “then these frameworks cease to be effective.”
Nature matters — but policymakers still don’t get it
To make the targets more effective, Pettorelli advocates for “a functional approach to biodiversity conservation.”
“If you imagine that ecosystem is a car, you might focus forever on whether you have all the tires and the right doors … and never wonder whether the car works or not,” she says. “I don’t think for a moment that you shouldn’t have a species-based approach to conservation. I just think that you absolutely have to complement that with an ecosystem one.”
Pettorelli was the lead author on a recent report from the British Ecological Society that took aim at the narrow way society often views the value we derive from ecosystems. One of her co-authors gave the example of a woodland as “an asset” that’s “invisible to many decision-makers.”
“It improves air quality, regulates water flow and provides places for recreation to keep us healthy, but we don’t measure any of that in our GDP figures,” Ian Dickie, director at Economics for the Environment Consultancy and a co-author of the report, said in a statement. “If we destroy that woodland, there’s no record of the loss in the national economic data.”
In short, Pettorelli adds, “There’s no real recognition of how nature contributes to society.”
A 2026 report from IPBES, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, reveals that $7.3 trillion of business spending hurts biodiversity. Meanwhile, only $220 billion goes to work that may benefit biodiversity.
And yet, existing research demonstrates the value of nature to humanity, Opel says. He points to the work of economist Partha Dasgupta that argues for changing the way we value ecosystems and biodiversity because our economies depend on nature.
“These are public goods,” Opel tells Mongabay in a subsequent email. And their necessity justifies investment to protect biodiversity. “Our view is that governments need to fund them and treat them like public education, public health, law enforcement, national defense, security and infrastructure.”
Still, observers lament the lack of political will to make those changes happen. And therein lies a challenge for high-level coordination of work on biodiversity, Pettorelli says.
“Don’t get me wrong … more money would be great,” she says. But, “There’s always quite a difference between the ambition of the GBF and the actual realization of what’s happening in countries.”
Hughes similarly sees a full realization of the importance of nature as a hurdle that must be overcome — and one that has yet to resonate broadly with decision-makers.
“Biodiversity is critical, and we cannot get movement in many areas of biodiversity without having political willpower and motivation,” she says. “We are still not getting that message across effectively.”
Banner image: A pair of hyacinth macaws (Anodorhynchus hyacinthinus), listed as vulnerable by the IUCN. Image © Robin Gwen Agarwal via iNaturalist (CC BY-NC 4.0).
John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
Citations:
Veldman, J. W., Overbeck, G. E., Negreiros, D., Mahy, G., Le Stradic, S., Fernandes, G. W., . . . Bond, W. J. (2015). Where tree planting and forest expansion are bad for biodiversity and ecosystem services. BioScience, 65(10), 1011-1018. doi:10.1093/biosci/biv118
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