Debt and Biodiversity: A Chinese Leadership Opportunity

This report sets out the opportunity for China to engage with emerging international policy and market developments around nature and biodiversity and its role in debt markets. China’s international leadership on the environment and its development of sophisticated green financial architecture put it in a key position to rapidly learn from international best practices and capitalise on evolving market developments around a new class of nature performance bonds.

The growth of these products in sovereign and corporate bond markets offers China global opportunities to deploy these instruments in the current crisis and to integrate the pricing of nature-related risks and opportunities more broadly into financial markets. The report concludes with recommendations about how China can effectively engage with these developments.

This report draws on a series of reports published by Finance for Biodiversity (F4B), including:

• Greening Sovereign Debt: Building a Nature and Climate Sovereign Bond Facility
• Recapitalising Sovereign Debt: Technical Paper and Policy Briefing
• Emerging Market Debt Crisis: Biodiversity as a Lever for Building Back Better

Task Force: Green Energy, Investment and Trade Topic: Sustainable Finance Year: 2021 Phase: Phase VI (2017-2022) Concluded