Unlocking private finance for nature: Addressing barriers and reframing risk-return dynamics

IF 4.1 2区综合性期刊 Q1 MULTIDISCIPLINARY SCIENCES

iScience Pub Date : 2025-10-06 DOI:10.1016/j.isci.2025.113669

Hassan Aftab Sheikh , Divya Narain , Clint Bartlett , Christophe Christiaen

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Abstract

Public finance alone is insufficient to meet the scale of investment required for nature protection, restoration, and sustainable management. Mobilizing private capital is therefore essential, yet most nature-related projects are perceived as unbankable. They sit at the frontier of bankability: nascent and unproven initiatives that lack historical track records, face high execution risks, and generate uncertain or delayed revenues. This misalignment is compounded by investor behavior, as most financiers demand commercial rates of return, standardized transactions, and short payback periods. Even though investors differ in their appetite for risk, nature projects rarely meet these thresholds. Through a systematic review of literature across five ecosystems and three intervention types, this review identifies persistent barriers: limited financial returns, high risk, high transaction costs, and undervaluation of nature. We note that enabling conditions such as blended finance, risk-sharing instruments, and supportive regulation exist; however, we argue that reframing risk-return dynamics is critical to unlock scalable private finance for nature.

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为自然释放私人融资：解决障碍并重新构建风险回报动态

仅靠公共财政不足以满足自然保护、恢复和可持续管理所需的投资规模。因此，调动私人资本至关重要，但大多数与自然有关的项目被认为无法获得银行的支持。它们处于可融资性的前沿：缺乏历史记录、面临高执行风险、产生不确定或延迟收入的新兴和未经验证的项目。投资者的行为加剧了这种错位，因为大多数金融家要求商业回报率、标准化交易和较短的投资回收期。尽管投资者对风险的偏好不同，但自然项目很少能达到这些门槛。通过对五个生态系统和三种干预类型的文献进行系统回顾，本综述确定了持续存在的障碍：有限的财务回报、高风险、高交易成本和对自然的低估。我们注意到，混合融资、风险分担工具和支持性监管等有利条件已经存在；然而，我们认为重构风险回报动态对于释放可扩展的自然领域私人融资至关重要。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

iScience Multidisciplinary-Multidisciplinary

CiteScore

7.20

自引率

1.70%

发文量

1972

审稿时长

6 weeks

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