Nearly two-thirds of biodiversity aid funding descriptions make no mention of local communities or local implementation, according to a new analysis from the International Institute for Environment and Development, raising questions about who actually directs conservation money on the ground.
The analysis examined about 233,000 biodiversity-tagged funding lines reported to the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee between 2011 and 2024. Only 2.24 per cent of funding descriptions mentioned Indigenous Peoples or related terms. The phrase “locally led” appeared in just 0.28 per cent of the finance reviewed, and “Indigenous-led” in only 0.001 per cent, six instances across the entire dataset.
IIED estimates that more than 99 per cent of nature projects remain led by actors other than the communities whose land and livelihoods the funding is meant to protect, even in cases where the eventual benefits reach those communities. Nicola Sorsby, a climate and nature researcher at IIED and the report’s author, said the findings “raise concerns over whether communities will have decision-making power” over how conservation money is spent, rather than simply receiving its downstream effects.
The timing is pointed. COP17, the UN biodiversity summit running in Yerevan from 19 to 30 October, is meant to track progress toward the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework’s finance goals: mobilising at least $200 billion a year by 2030 for nature, while cutting harmful subsidies by at least $500 billion annually. IIED’s analysis suggests that even as those totals are negotiated, the mechanisms for ensuring money reaches local and Indigenous-led initiatives remain largely undeveloped.
Funds not yet delivering at scale
Two of the frameworks meant to channel finance to nature, the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund and the Cali Fund, have not yet delivered support at the scale negotiators envisaged when they were created, according to IIED. Around one million species face extinction globally, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a figure that has kept pressure on negotiators to show that new money is reaching effective conservation rather than administrative overhead.
Sorsby cautioned that the study relies on keyword analysis of donor-reported descriptions rather than tracing where money physically ends up, so it cannot confirm exactly how much aid reaches local recipients in practice. Even with that caveat, she said the pattern across more than a decade of funding data points to a structural gap. “Evidence shows nature does better when these groups take the lead on conservation,” she said, adding that negotiators “must make sure new announcements about funding include specific provisions” for local and Indigenous control, rather than assuming it will follow automatically from larger budgets.
Built on an earlier commitment
The International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity has previously welcomed a COP16 decision to create a permanent subsidiary body under the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Article 8(j), which recognises the role of Indigenous and local knowledge in conservation. IIED’s analysis suggests that institutional recognition has not yet translated into a comparable shift in how funding itself is designed and reported, leaving a gap between the summit process and the money meant to follow it.
With several more days of negotiations ahead in Yerevan, the report adds to pressure on wealthy donor countries to specify, rather than merely imply, how new biodiversity finance commitments will reach the communities whose territories hold much of the world’s remaining biodiversity. The report arrives alongside separate findings from the research group Earth Insight showing that oil, gas and mining concessions already overlap large areas nominally protected under the same global framework, a pairing that suggests the finance gap and the enforcement gap are, in practice, the same problem viewed from different sides.
