Costa Rica: a fuel tax that bought a forest back

In 1987 forest covered as little as 40% of Costa Rica, after decades of clearing for cattle and crops. Today it covers close to 60%. The country did not achieve that with a ban. In 1997, under a forestry law passed the year before, it began paying landowners for the environmental services their trees provide: carbon, water, biodiversity and scenery. The money came mainly from a tax on fuel sales, topped up by private firms and, later, by carbon payments. In 2022 Costa Rica received its first US$16.4 million from the World Bank's carbon fund for 3.28 million tonnes of emissions it had kept in the trees in 2018 and 2019.

What makes it copyable is the plumbing. A fuel tax is collected anyway. Routing a slice of it to standing forest turns a general revenue line into a purchase of something the rest of the economy depends on, and it does so through contracts with private landowners rather than through land the state has to own. The forest came back because keeping it became a source of income rather than a cost of not clearing it.

Seychelles: a small debt swap that protected a sea larger than Germany

In 2016 Seychelles exchanged US$21.6 million of foreign debt for a commitment to finance marine conservation at home, the first debt-for-nature swap built around an ocean rather than a forest. The money went into a trust, the Seychelles Conservation and Climate Adaptation Trust, which pays for the country's marine spatial plan and for grants to the people who fish and work its waters. On 26 March 2020 the government announced the last of the areas that took its ocean protection from 0.04% of its exclusive economic zone to 30%: 410,000 square kilometres, an area larger than Germany, fully or significantly safeguarded.

The number to notice is the first one. US$21.6 million is a rounding error in sovereign finance. It worked because it was attached to a plan, a trust that outlives governments, and a measurable target with a date. The larger conversions that followed, in Belize, Gabon, the Galápagos, El Salvador and Ecuador's Amazon, copied that structure with more zeros.

Namibia: a fifth of the country, owned by the people who live there

Namibia wrote community conservation into law in 1996. Rural communities that form a conservancy gain the right to manage, and to earn from, the wildlife on their communal land. There are now 86 registered conservancies covering 166,184 square kilometres, about a fifth of the country, home to roughly 245,000 people. In 2017 the programme generated N$132.8 million in returns and benefits, including the value of harvested meat, through 54 joint-venture lodge agreements and 56 conservation-hunting agreements. Not every conservancy pays its way: 69 of the 86 generated returns that year and 39 covered their own operating costs. That honesty is part of why the model has lasted.

The mechanism here is ownership. Wildlife on communal land was worth nothing to the people living beside it until the law made its income theirs. Once it was, elephants, lions and rhino became assets that a village had reasons to keep alive, and the land stayed open rather than fenced and ploughed.

What the three have in common

None of the three waited for a global price on nature. Each found a payment that already existed, a fuel tax, a debt service bill, a tourist's spend, and re-routed part of it to the living system that the payment quietly depended on. Each wrote the arrangement into law or into a trust so that it survived the government that signed it. And each published a number, forest cover, square kilometres, income to conservancies, that could be checked, which is why they can be written about here with their sources.

The US$220 billion a year that the world invests in nature is not a big number. It is, though, made of items like these, and every one of them started as a decision somebody could have not taken.

What the number is made of

The against side is two flows. Private finance to activities that damage ecosystems accounts for US$4.9 trillion, and public subsidies that reward those activities account for US$2.4 trillion. Together they are US$7.3 trillion a year, or about US$231,000 a second, which is the rate at which the counter on our home page runs.

The for side is smaller in every way. Finance for nature-based solutions reached US$220 billion in 2023, up from US$200 billion, and its growth rate halved, from 11% to 5%. Nine-tenths of it, US$197 billion, is public money. The private sector, which controls most of the capital on earth, contributes US$23.4 billion, one dollar in ten.

The need is known too. UNEP's estimate is US$571 billion a year by 2030. Current flows are 38.5% of that, so the world has to increase them two and a half times in four years. The gap, US$351 billion a year, sounds enormous until it is set beside the other column: it is about two and a half weeks of the against side.

Why the ratio, not the gap, is the story

A gap invites a fundraising campaign. A ratio describes a direction of travel. Redirecting 5% of the finance that flows against nature, about US$365 billion a year, would close the gap entirely, with no new money at all. The Global Biodiversity Framework already asks for something like this: Target 18 commits governments to cutting harmful subsidies by at least US$500 billion a year by 2030, and Target 19 to mobilising US$200 billion a year for nature. Both targets are, in effect, instructions to move money from one column to the other.

That is why we treat thirty to one as the first number anyone in finance should know about nature. It says that the problem is not a shortage of capital. It is the price of capital's destination, and at the moment that price is zero.

The counter-argument, taken seriously

Most of the US$7.3 trillion is not villainy. It is farming, construction, mining, shipping and energy: the activities that feed and house people. You cannot switch them off, and nobody serious proposes to.

The point is narrower and harder. Half of world economic output, about US$44 trillion, is moderately or highly dependent on nature, on the pollinators, aquifers, soils and coastlines that these same activities draw down. Money flowing against nature is money flowing against the systems that a large part of the economy runs on, and none of it carries a price for what it consumes. That is a mispricing. Mispricings get corrected, either by markets when they finally see the number, or by events when they do not.

The dates

This year the correction has a calendar.

From 19 to 30 October 2026, at COP17 in Yerevan, the ISSB is expected to publish its exposure draft of a nature-related disclosure standard, built on the TNFD framework that 733 organisations with US$22.4 trillion under management have already adopted. Nature becomes a line item in the accounting standards that most of the world's listed companies report under.

On 30 December 2026, the EU's deforestation regulation applies to large and medium companies selling soy, palm oil, cocoa, coffee, beef, rubber or timber into Europe. Each shipment must be shown not to have cost a forest.

Between September and November, a strong El Niño peaks. The World Meteorological Organization expects drier than normal conditions across southern Africa and the Indian subcontinent. For companies that depend on rain in those places, the against side of the ratio arrives as a line in the next earnings release.

And in South Africa, where we work, one of the twenty largest listed companies has formally adopted the TNFD framework. No South African bank has. Nineteen of the twenty have not yet committed to the framework that will ask them which half of their business depends on nature, with the exposure draft weeks away and the final standard expected in 2027.

The decision

Thirty to one is a ratio of money, not of morals, and the market's own language is the right one to use about it. For every dollar spent protecting the systems the economy runs on, more than thirty are spent degrading them, and for the first time the degradation is about to be priced, by standard-setters, by regulators and by weather. Where a company sits on that ratio is a fact about its earnings. Starting at COP17, we will publish it, company by company.

Here is what will be public by then.

The Nature Ticker

It is already running on our home page: what the world finances against nature and for it, at the honest average rate, since the page was opened, since the start of the year, and against what is needed by 2030. Every constant comes from a published source, and the sources are on the page. At launch the Ticker becomes an embeddable widget, free to any site, with the constants and sources served alongside the numbers so that every figure can be audited by whoever quotes it.

The Nature Quadrant

Every large listed company placed on two axes: how much it depends on nature, and how much it does to nature. Four regions with plain-English names. A fund appears as a cloud of its holdings. The Quadrant is the map that everything else is drawn on, and it is designed to be shared, so it will export as an image with its source line intact.

Nature Balance Sheets

One page per company. What it takes from nature, what it does to nature, what it discloses, and what that is worth at risk, the Extinction Discount. The first hundred, covering the largest companies in the world and every company in the JSE Top 40, are published at COP17. Five hundred by December. Every company receives its scores and the data behind them ten working days before publication, with a right of reply.

Fund Truth 2026

Every fund and ETF sold with "biodiversity", "nature" or "natural capital" in its name, rated on what its holdings do to nature rather than on what the marketing says. The report is published during COP17. Right-of-reply letters go to fund managers by 1 October.

The rules

Three rules apply to all of it. Ratings are never for sale, and advisory clients are scored by the same pipeline as everyone else. The method is public: version 1.0 is published with the launch, and every change after that is logged. Every figure has a parent: a source and a date, on the page, or it does not get published.

Between now and then

The BE Brief starts before the launch: one chart, one number, one argument, on Thursdays. Notes like this one will appear here as the work lands. The counters keep running.