Recent UN summits on climate and biodiversity have both ended in what were seen as major disappointments, but a recent report from the United Nations Environment Program details that finance to protect nature is surging from the world’s banking and investment houses.

Raising elevenfold in just four years, various financial mediums such as managed accounts, electronically-traded funds, debt-for-nature swaps, and venture capital funding have raised the total amount of private investment into nature and biodiversity to over $100 billion.

If capital continues to flow at current rates, though that seems unlikely, the private sector would have contributed over $1 trillion by 2030 into investments that protect nature in some way.

Global media reports a lot on the “COP” or conference of the parties [to a treaty], most commonly referring to the parties of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, of which the most recent iteration was COP29. Confusingly, mainstream media will also use COP to refer to the parties to the Convention on Biodiversity, which recently concluded in Rome, and was called COP16.

In both COPs 29 and 16, agreements were struck to fund climate change resilience and biodiversity protection respectively, but neither left anyone feeling positive for the future. COP29 was seen as too great a compromise. At COP15, a $200 billion per year fund by 20230 was seen as a major success, but already the world’s developed nations are not even closely holding to these funding commitments.

In the shadow of what many environmental journalists would describe as the failure of the Developed World to confront two of the biggest challenges of our age, the private sector is quietly picking up the slack.

Never capable of leveraging the resources of modern nation-states, private capital, such as investment firms, hedge funds, banks, and venture capital funds, nevertheless have the benefit of being able to generate sustainable funding for nature by identifying mutually beneficial agreements and investments that are insulated from the swaying wills of politicians and voters.

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In 2020, of the $9.4 billion of private sector capital channeled to protect nature, $2.5 billion came through philanthropy: an unsustainable form of finance. Illustrative of this was philanthropic contributions falling by $700 million by 2025, despite the fact that overall funding for nature had risen, according to the UN’s World Biodiversity Forum, to $102 billion—60% of which was driven by private equity investments.

By 2030, growth could reach $1 trillion—which would be more than what was asked in direct government grants by the COP biodiversity panelists during COP15 in Colombia, and the COP16.