UN World Wildlife Day 2025 – Conservation finance: investing in people and planet

Every year on 3rd March, the UN celebrates the critical role animals and plants play not just in surprising and delighting us, but in sustaining the ecosystem services we all rely on. This year’s World Wildlife Day spotlights conservation or ‘green’ finance—a potentially game-changing shift in how we value nature.

For too long treated as an afterthought in economic decision-making, nature is increasingly recognised as the foundation of both planetary and economic health. Private investment in its recovery is accelerating, and we need to ensure this opportunity leads to real, lasting improvements in the health of our natural environment.

When we refer to green finance, we mean ways of raising funding outside of traditional mechanisms.

Rather than bidding for philanthropic grants or publicly-funded support schemes, we might talk to corporate partners about donating large sums of money or investing in a project that provides a return – whether tangible or intangible.

Plenty of brilliant nature recovery work has been and will need to continue to be funded by tried and tested sources, partly because there aren’t many examples of green finance supporting nature recovery activity at scale. But in order to achieve scale and permanence, a new blended approach is needed.

The complexities of green finance

For conservation organisations and nature recovery partnerships like Big Chalk, green finance is both an exciting opportunity and a challenge.

The opportunity? More focus on our core mission, more collaboration, and the potential to use large-scale investments to catalyse nature’s recovery at the scale needed.

The challenges, however, are significant:

• Many of the regulations requiring businesses to fund nature recovery activities are still voluntary. Until these are mandated, the cashflow will be limited.
• Corporate organisations are turning to conservationists for business cases and investment pitches. We are being asked to transform the way we design and communicate nature recovery projects to appeal to an entirely new audience.
• The conservation sector needs to engage with new risks, including greenwashing, requiring ethical charters that clarify their expectations of new business partners.

Conservationists are no strangers to funding challenges, but green finance presents a profound one—ensuring such schemes truly serve nature.

As we navigate this evolving landscape, we need to lead the conversation with potential corporate partners, shaping ethical partnerships and projects that catalyse nature’s recovery rather than distract from it. And we need to monitor and evaluate our combined efforts, ensuring learning is shared and experiences built upon.

Adopting a common vocabulary with partners will help, making it easier to find common ground and focus on opportunities with complementary benefits. One helpful technique is to consider all of the ‘capitals’ when developing projects: natural, social, economic, and produced. What are the impacts, risks, and opportunities to each of these capitals of investing in and delivering a particular project, and how can we improve and manage them for long-term benefit?

Preparing to engage with green finance

While today’s nature markets aren’t mature enough to fund ambitious, multi-habitat programmes at the scale of Big Chalk, the hope is this will change in the future.

The National Landscapes Association, working with Finance Earth, is investigating realistic opportunities for unlocking investment capital of a scale that would allow for meaningful short-term progress towards Big Chalk’s vision of nature-rich chalk and limestone landscapes.

This could be a partnership with a corporate who has an interest in the health and resilience of chalk and limestone landscapes. One obvious and exciting opportunity is water supply, including elements of quality and storage. The geology and ecology of Big Chalk’s chalk and limestone landscapes mean our partnership is uniquely placed to help safeguard this essential service – millions of people in southeast England alone depend on chalk aquifers for their drinking water.

To make its vision a reality, Big Chalk’s partnership of more than 150 organisations needs to generate the resources to deliver thriving, resilient landscapes and associated ecosystem services across 20% of England.

Integration is key, as evidenced by the partnership’s use of public innovation funds to develop a grassland toolkit to support farmers and land managers in attracting resources, including green finance, to manage wildlife-rich grasslands sustainably.

As we celebrate World Wildlife Day, we find ourselves in an evolving financial landscape that could reshape the funding model for nature’s recovery. The Big Chalk Partnership, supported by the National Landscapes Association and the Protected Landscapes Partnership, is stepping up to ensure green finance works for nature, not against it.

Now is the time to be bold, innovative, and relentless in ensuring nature is not only valued fully but restored across our iconic chalk and limestone landscapes, helping safeguard the essential ecosystem services they provide.

Rebecca Hunt, Nature-based Solutions Project Officer, National Landscapes Association and David Hoccom, Programme Lead, Big Chalk Partnership