Europe is investing billions in biodiversity protection and restoration — and yet private capital barely flows into this space. Why? The BIO-CAPITAL project went looking for an answer and found one: not in a shortage of data, not in a shortage of financial instruments, but in a structural gap between the two.

The newly published policy brief “Interoperability by Design” makes this finding plain. Ecological monitoring systems and financial reporting frameworks simply speak different languages. The CAP and the Nature Restoration Regulation generate valuable biodiversity data — but that data is not structured in a way that investors, banks, or insurers can actually use.

Three Recommendations for the National Restoration Plans

The timing of this publication is no coincidence. EU Member States are required to submit their National Restoration Plans (NRPs) by 1 September 2026. BIO-CAPITAL sees this as a unique opportunity — and responds with three concrete recommendations.

First, NRP monitoring frameworks should be designed from the outset so that ecological data can flow directly into financial decision-making — in particular by aligning with ESRS E4 and the EU Taxonomy.

Second, restoration measures should be structured so they can be bundled into investable portfolios, supported by blended finance mechanisms and dedicated technical assistance for smaller actors. Third — and perhaps the most urgent message — the data infrastructure for biodiversity monitoring must be built on open, interoperable standards from day one. Interoperability does not emerge on its own: it must be actively constructed. Retrofitting it later is more expensive and rarely complete.

A Window That Is Closing

BIO-CAPITAL’s research findings show that the problem is not data scarcity — it is data fragmentation. Even publicly available satellite data such as Sentinel or Landsat is practically impossible to combine across sources due to divergent licensing conditions and access restrictions. That costs time, money, and ultimately biodiversity-investment appetite.

🔗 Download the full policy brief here:

At its General Assembly in early June, the BIO-CAPITAL consortium aligned on a clearer account of what the project sets out to deliver — and worked through, collectively, the open questions that still lie ahead.

From 3 to 5 June 2026, the full BIO-CAPITAL consortium gathered in Bucharest for its General Assembly. After two years of collaboration across all six project work packages, it was a chance to step back from the individual work streams and realign on where the whole effort is heading — and on the ideas that hold it together.

Much of the discussion returned to a deceptively simple question: what, exactly, is BIO-CAPITAL building? The answer the consortium reaffirmed is precise – however, there remain topics which require in-depth discussion. The project is developing the parameters and methods by which biodiversity gain can be measured — a rigorous, transferable way of assessing biodiversity status and uplift — rather than setting out to demonstrate that uplift on any single site. An important caveat: BIO-CAPITAL develops parameters, not outcomes that can be measured using parameters. The distinction matters, because it keeps the work focused on its most durable contribution: instruments that others can keep using, long after the project ends, to judge whether a landscape is genuinely recovering.

That same clarity shapes how the project thinks about biodiversity certificates, and here BIO-CAPITAL takes a deliberately different view from many peers in the field of biodiversity finance. Where many actors treat biodiversity certificates first as tradable market assets, BIO-CAPITAL approaches them as a compliance and assessment mechanism: a credible way to verify and document biodiversity outcomes, rather than a commodity to be bought and sold.

Alongside the conceptual work, colleagues have begun matching candidate financial instruments to the particular context of each use case — recognising that what suits an Alpine forest, a Slovenian meadow or a Cornish river corridor will differ considerably. Several deliverables now in preparation, including forthcoming work dedicated to the financial instruments themselves, will deepen this picture over the coming months.

A recurring theme was how to bring farmers, land managers, and other relevant stakeholders into that story. From the use cases came a clear request: materials that can be shared directly with farmers and other stakeholders, carrying a straightforward message and value proposition — that they themselves stand to benefit, as biodiversity certificates make it possible, in time, to attach income streams to the careful management that keeps species-rich land alive.

The Assembly also looked at how the project communicates its own progress. The consortium agreed to report more regularly on the work of its individual work packages and on its deliverables — including here, on the project website — and to use upcoming deep-dive sessions to keep everyone abreast of what is coming next. Further ahead, planning has begun for the project’s final event, which will be staged in the second half of 2027.

Bucharest, in the end, did what a good mid-project assembly should. It turned a set of parallel work strands back into a shared sense of direction — and a sharper account of the question BIO-CAPITAL exists to answer.

With thanks to the colleagues at ICEADR who hosted the General Assembly in Bucharest.

On the wind-scoured arable plains of southern Romania, two farms are rebuilding the biodiversity that intensive agriculture stripped away — and showing what BIO-CAPITAL’s monitoring and finance work will need to capture.

The plains of southern Romania hold some of the most fertile farmland in Europe — deep chernozem soils — and some of the most simplified. Decades of intensive arable cultivation, on a landscape increasingly battered by drought, summers above 40 °C and persistent wind erosion, have left little room for anything but the crop. Here, biodiversity is not the threatened norm it is elsewhere; it is the deliberate exception. In early June, a field visit took a small group to two farms in the Muntenia region working to put it back.

The first, an organic farm near Vâlcelele in Călărași county, is a different kind of experiment. With synthetic inputs eliminated and the soil managed through permanent cover, diverse rotations and flowering buffer strips, it has become what the project describes as an agroecological hotspot — alive with earthworms, mycorrhizal fungi and pollinators. The nearest forest is several kilometres away, which only sharpens the point: in a simplified landscape, this farm has built its own core of biodiversity, almost from scratch.

The second, near Bucu in Ialomița county, sits in an intensively cultivated plain of wheat, maize and sunflower. What sets it apart are its forest belts — curtains of trees and shrubs planted through the arable land. They do double duty: as climate adaptation, slowing the wind, holding moisture and protecting the soil; and as green infrastructure, threading microhabitats for birds, beneficial insects and small mammals across an otherwise uniform landscape. With a forest and a lake close by, the belts knit the farm into a local ecological corridor.

For Harold Clenet of GeoSys, who works on BIO-CAPITAL’s remote-sensing strand, the visit carried the same value as the project’s Slovenian trip weeks earlier. On these vast, uniform plains, the features that matter ecologically — a line of trees, a single organic plot — are small, scattered green elements in a sea of monoculture. Knowing how they look and function on the ground is what makes it possible to recognise, and eventually to value, them from space. Hosting the visit, Steliana Rodino and Dragomir Vili of ICEADR, which leads the Romanian use case, walked the group through both the ecology of the sites and the everyday realities of farming here.

Those realities are not simple. Planting and maintaining forest belts costs money in the early years, when there is little to show for it, and many farmers still see green infrastructure as land taken from production rather than added to it. As yet, no market rewards a farm for the biodiversity it shelters. Closing that gap — finding financial instruments that make agroecology and green infrastructure pay — is precisely what the Romanian use case sets out to explore.

Romania offers BIO-CAPITAL a particular test: not how to protect biodiversity that already exists, but how to make the case — ecologically and financially — for putting it back. The two farms near Bucu and Vâlcele are early evidence that it can be done. The harder question is how to make it worth doing, at scale.

With thanks to Steliana Rodino, Dragomir Vili and the ICEADR team for hosting the visit.

A field visit to BIO-CAPITAL’s Slovenian use case showed why Europe’s most species-rich meadows are vanishing — and what it would take to give them a future.

A satellite sees a grassland as a pattern of reflected light. A botanist sees it as a community of dozens of species — some of them rare, all of them shaped by how, and whether, the meadow is mown and grazed. Closing the distance between those two ways of seeing is one of the quieter challenges at the heart of BIO-CAPITAL. In late May, it took a very concrete form: a field visit to the project’s Slovenian use case.

UC4 focuses on species-rich semi-natural grasslands across nine Natura 2000 sites in Slovenia — among the most biodiverse agricultural habitats in Europe, and among the most fragile. Their richness is not a given but the product of centuries of low-intensity farming. For generations these meadows were mown because their grass was needed: it fed the animals of small mixed farms, and that simple need kept an ancient cycle turning. As those animals disappear from the farming system, the reason to cut the grass disappears with them.

Once the mowing stops, the cycle breaks and the grassland begins to unravel — along one of three paths. Some meadows are overrun by invasive species such as goldenrod (Solidago) and ragweed (Ambrosia); others are slowly claimed by scrub and woodland; others still are ploughed up and absorbed into intensively farmed arable land. Each path ends in the same place: the loss of the biodiversity that made these grasslands matter in the first place.

This is the loss that Pratensis has set out to reverse: the company has committed itself to conserving Slovenia’s species-rich grasslands. Maruška Cuc, who manages the use case, had prepared a programme that did justice to the problem’s complexity. Over the course of the visit, the group met several of the local stakeholders whose everyday decisions shape these landscapes — the farmers and land managers without whose continued care the meadows’ biodiversity would simply not exist.

For two of the visitors, the trip was more than a courtesy. Harold Clenet of GeoSys and Julien Radoux of UCLouvain work on the remote-sensing side of BIO-CAPITAL: the satellite-based monitoring that the project hopes will make grassland biodiversity measurable at scale, and ultimately financeable. But a satellite signal only means something if you know what it corresponds to on the ground. Seeing the biodiversity parameters in person — the structure of the sward, the flowering, the indicator species that betray a meadow’s condition — is what lets them connect a pixel to a place.

This is ground-truthing in the most literal sense, and it is built into the project’s method: field validation underpins the biodiversity indicators on which the geospatial work depends. It is also a reminder of remote sensing’s limits. Satellites can track habitat extent, management changes and the broad colourfulness of grasslands across whole regions — but on their own they cannot capture every species-specific or micro-habitat signal. The two perspectives are complementary, not interchangeable.

There is a hard irony running through all of this. The practices that would keep these meadows alive are not unknown — they were refined in the region over centuries. What is missing is a reason to keep applying them. The Common Agricultural Policy, as it currently stands, offers little financial incentive to maintain biodiverse grassland, and the farmers we met spoke plainly about how difficult it has become to reconcile environmental stewardship with financial survival. A meadow performs an environmental function that has real value; the trouble is that no market presently pays for it.

That gap is precisely where BIO-CAPITAL is working. The financial instruments the project is developing — payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity certificates, result-based schemes — all rest on being able to credibly measure what is happening in a grassland, and then to attach a value to it. Credible measurement, this visit made clear, begins with standing in one.

With thanks to Maruška Cuc and the Pratensis team, and to the Slovenian stakeholders who shared their time and their meadows.

Within the Bio-Capital project, the Italian Sustainable Investment Forum (ItaSIF) is leading Work Package 2 (WP2), dedicated to mapping and assessing financial instruments , policy directions, and investment opportunities that support biodiversity protection and restoration across the project’s five Use Cases. WP2 explores the opportunities, challenges, barriers, and enabling factors within the current policy, financing, and investment landscape for addressing biodiversity loss and strengthening ecosystem resilience.

As the final stages of Bio-Capital will activate innovative sustainable finance solutions and integrate advanced geospatial analytics technologies to mobilise private capital, it was essential to establish from the outset a shared and robust knowledge base on the context in which the project operates.

The work on building a solid knowledge base started with an overview of the EU strategies, regulations and directives, international agreements, and global standards that shape the biodiversity investment landscape. The objectives set out in EU startegies  are implemented through different types of legal acts, some binding, others voluntary, some applicable to all Member States, others only to specific countries. For this reason, gaining a clear and structured understanding of both the European and national regulatory frameworks was a crucial first step.

Beyond regulation, the analysis also includes the identification of existing investment instruments, alternative funding mechanisms, and project pipelines capable of addressing biodiversity loss and supporting ecosystem restoration.

Overall, WP2 provides the theoretical basis for the development and implementation of biodiversity-friendly financial solutions and for engaging the investment community throughout the project’s lifecycle. This baseline work is essential for achieving Bio-Capital’s final objectives for two key reasons:

1. It highlights the direct connection  between the stability of natural ecosystems and the stability of economic systems.
2. It clarifies  which tools, methodologies, and approaches are already available to integrate biodiversity considerations into financial decision-making.

Biodiversity’s Economic Value

There is a clear and growing connection between ecological and economic stability. The loss of biodiversity increases the likelihood of extreme climate-related events and threatens food and water security. Habitat destruction and species decline reduce agricultural and fisheries productivity, generating direct economic impacts across multiple sectors. In fact, more than half of the world’s GDP (around $44 trillion) is closely tied to natural resources (WEF, 2020), and entire economic sectors directly rely on ecosystem services (for example, agriculture and the food industry, textiles, tourism, construction).

From a double materiality perspective, it is essential  to assess  both the risks stemming from the loss of biodiversity and the impacts of economic activities on ecosystems. These risks can be categorised similarly to climate risks: physical risks, arising  from  ecosystem degradation and the loss of essential services and transition risks linked to  regulatory changes, market shifts, technological developments, and evolving consumer expectations). These risks, in turn, can translate into  financial risks such as credit and counterparty, operational, market, and liquidity risks. Therefore, financial institutions must carefully evaluate and manage these risks, as highlighted by the Network for Greening the Financial System (NFGS).

Translating Biodiversity Priorities into Financial Practice

Achieving a global reversal of biodiversity loss by 2030 will require annual investments between $722 and $967 billion over the next decade. Yet the biodiversity finance gap, estimated at $700 billion per year, represents the shortfall in financial resources required to effectively protect and restore nature (UNEP, 2025). At the same time, public and private financial flows associated with environmentally harmful activities amount to nearly USD 7 trillion annually (UNEP, 2023). This contrast highlights the urgency of redirecting capital away from nature-negative activities and towards investments that protect and restore ecosystems.

As both an institution and a Bio-Capital partner, ITASIF’s role is to support financial market operators in their transition towards sustainable, biodiversity-positive investments. Our work therefore centers on highlighting the tools, methodologies, and approaches already available to integrate biodiversity considerations into financial strategies and products.

These include indicators to assess issuers’ transition plans; exclusions and disinvestment from sectors, companies and countries with the most harmful biodiversity impacts; green bonds and nature bonds  to finance ecosystem conservation and restoration projects; nature-related certificates and biodiversity credits to demonstrate measurable improvements; ad-hoc insurance solutions to mitigate physical and transition risks, leveraging nature-based solutions.

Stay tuned for the next phase of the project and follow Bio-Capital for upcoming insights, tools and results.

Biodiversity loss is accelerating — yet capital flows into nature remain slow, fragmented, and difficult to scale. While development banks, pension funds and institutional investors increasingly recognise ecological risk, the financial system itself is poorly equipped to deal with the complexity, locality and long time horizons of biodiversity. This tension formed the starting point of a recent BIO-CAPITAL Deep Dive, where Berat Efe Alkan (17s), Umut Gökcen Yilmaz (AIPA) and Tayfun Bashi (17s) explored how programmable finance could help close the gap between biodiversity needs and financial practice.

Why biodiversity doesn’t fit traditional finance

Unlike carbon, biodiversity cannot be reduced to a single metric. Impacts are highly context-specific, seasonal, and often slow to materialise. Verification is expensive, indicators are numerous, and standardisation remains difficult. From a financial perspective, this creates uncertainty around risk, performance and accountability.

As the speakers noted, the problem is not a lack of capital — but a lack of financial tools capable of handling complex, data-rich, multi-actor systems over long time horizons. Traditional financing models struggle to operate under these conditions.

What is programmable finance?

Programmable finance refers to financial flows that execute automatically once predefined and verified conditions are met. Unlike conventional digital banking — which mainly digitises existing processes — programmable finance embeds conditionality directly into financial logic. In practice, this means that:

• payments, interest rates or incentives change automatically
• decisions are triggered by verified data
• execution does not depend on manual reporting or discretionary approvals

The speakers illustrated this with a simple analogy: a smartwatch that adjusts insurance premiums automatically based on verified health data. Applied to biodiversity, the principle is the same — except the data comes from satellite observations, certification schemes, and environmental monitoring systems.

From data to financial action

A core requirement for programmable finance is trusted data infrastructure. The Deep Dive highlighted how geospatial data, telemetry systems, certification protocols and third-party verification can feed directly into smart financial contracts. Once agreed thresholds are reached — for example improvements in habitat quality, pollinator presence or regenerative practices — financial actions are triggered automatically. Conditionality becomes operational, not merely contractual.

Crucially, programmable finance is not limited to simple, peer-to-peer transactions. Its real potential emerges in complex supply chains, where multiple actors, data sources and environmental impacts interact. Here, machine learning and large-scale data processing allow financial logic to respond to indirect, cumulative and long-term effects.

Use cases: agriculture, supply chains and biodiversity credits

The session explored several illustrative scenarios. In agriculture, sustainability-linked loans could automatically adjust interest rates based on verified pollinator habitats or pesticide-free management. In supply chains, payments between producers, traders and brands could be triggered by verified reductions in water use or chemical inputs.

In biodiversity credit schemes, programmable finance could ensure that payments are released only when ecological outcomes are demonstrated — rather than upfront or based on projected impact. Across these contexts, the approach reduces risk for investors while increasing accountability for environmental performance.

Why this matters for BIO-CAPITAL

As with parametric insurance — another BIO-CAPITAL Deep Dive topic — programmable finance shifts the focus from compensation and promises to automatic, rule-based execution linked to real-world conditions. It offers a concrete mechanism to align financial systems with the realities of ecosystems: complex, data-rich and slow-moving.

Programmable finance will not replace all existing instruments. But as data quality, verification frameworks and digital infrastructure mature, it could become a critical building block for scaling outcome-based biodiversity finance — ensuring that money flows when, and only when, nature actually benefits.

How can biodiversity be measured, valued and financed on farms — in ways that work for farmers, policymakers and investors alike? This question was at the heart of the BIO-CAPITAL Technical Day on Biodiversity in Agriculture, held in Toulouse and organised by Agri Sud-Ouest Innovation as part of the BIO-CAPITAL Horizon Europe project.

Agri Sud-Ouest Innovation, one of the French partners in our project, regularly hosts its J-TECH event series. The last event on 4 December was devoted in detail to the topics covered by BIO-CAPITAL. The event brought together regional authorities, researchers, Earth observation experts, financial actors and practitioners for a full day of presentations, discussions and exchanges — highlighting both what already works in biodiversity remuneration, and what is still missing to scale it.

Setting the scene: BIO-CAPITAL and its objectives

The day opened with an overview of the BIO-CAPITAL project, presented by Romane Bizieau (Agri Sud-Ouest Innovation). BIO-CAPITAL aims to mobilise both public and private funding for biodiversity conservation and restoration by combining innovative financial mechanisms with satellite-based monitoring. Participants were introduced to the project’s use cases, ongoing work on biodiversity indicators, and the broader ambition to design credible frameworks for biodiversity certificates that can complement existing public instruments.

The regional context was then outlined by Natacha Racinais and Bénédicte Goffre from the Regional Biodiversity Agency (ARB) Occitanie. Their presentation highlighted the ecological pressures facing agriculture in the region — from habitat fragmentation and pesticide use to pollinator decline — alongside the diversity of public instruments already in place.

Measuring biodiversity on farms: ecology meets Earth observation

A central part of the Technical Day focused on how biodiversity can be measured at farm scale in a way that is both scientifically sound and operational. From an ecological perspective, Jean-Louis Hemptinne (ENSFEA) reminded participants that biodiversity is not simply about counting species, but about genetic diversity and ecological interactions that sustain ecosystem functioning and resilience. He emphasised the importance of landscape structure as a practical proxy for biodiversity outcomes: the share and distribution of (semi-)natural habitats, field morphology, crop rotations and agroforestry.

This ecological framing was complemented by a technical deep dive into remote sensing and indicators, presented by Harold Clenet (EarthDaily Agro) and Lisa Delvaux (UCLouvain). They demonstrated how satellite data can be used to map hedgerows, ponds, mowing frequency, bare soil and crop diversity, and how time series allow changes in practices to be tracked over time. The key message was clear: scalable biodiversity finance depends on robust proxy indicators, combining satellite data, administrative datasets and targeted field verification — rather than costly and incomplete biological inventories.

Financing biodiversity on farms: public schemes and private potential

The late-morning roundtable addressed one of the most practical questions of the day: how to finance biodiversity on farms. Romane Jubera (Agrosolutions) and Sylvie Jego (Agence de l’Eau Adour-Garonne) presented concrete examples of Payments for Environmental Services (PES) already operating at scale. These schemes remunerate farmers for biodiversity-friendly practices that go beyond legal requirements, using clearly defined indicators and transparent payment thresholds.

At the same time, Flore Bastelica (Carbone 4) discussed the emerging role of biodiversity certificates as a way to channel private finance into biodiversity outcomes. Unlike regulatory offsets, these certificates are conceived as voluntary contributions aligned with territorial strategies, designed to complement — not replace — public funding.

Farm representatives and advisers underlined the importance of economic viability, low transaction costs and simple frameworks, as well as the need to strengthen value chains that can sustain biodiversity-friendly practices beyond subsidies.

A shared takeaway from the day

Across presentations and discussions, a shared conclusion emerged: biodiversity remuneration already exists, but scaling it requires clearer frameworks, trusted measurement and stronger coordination between public and private actors.

This is precisely the space BIO-CAPITAL is working in — testing indicators, monitoring approaches and financing mechanisms that can make biodiversity funding more transparent, credible and accessible for farmers and investors alike: Biodiversity is not the cherry on the cake: it must become the main weave of agriculture.

The full recording of the Technical Day is available here (English subtitles available):
👉  www.youtube.com

How do we finance biodiversity protection without repeating the mistakes of carbon offset markets? That question shaped the fifth BIO-CAPITAL Deep Dive, where Flore Bastelica of Carbone 4 introduced a financial tool designed to bring credibility and transparency into nature restoration: Biodiversity Certificates.

Unlike traditional offset schemes — where environmental harm in one place is balanced by restoration in another — biodiversity certificates shift the focus from compensation to contribution. Instead of paying to cancel out damage, buyers support projects that create measurable, verified ecological gains: restored wetlands, richer soils, healthier pollinator habitats, resilient forests. For a certificate to be issued, those gains must be additional, durable, and scientifically documented — improvements that would not have happened without the payment behind them.

Developing a Protocol for Real-World Use

Bastelica explained that BIO-CAPITAL is now developing a shared protocol to make this possible across the project’s use cases, from grasslands and agroecological farms to river corridors and wetlands. The work involves iterative testing, alignment across partners, and constant feedback from practitioners on the ground. The goal is not just to generate certificates, but to make sure they are trusted.

Trust matters, because carbon markets have shown how quickly credibility can erode. Over-estimating results, failing to account for ecosystem leakage, ignoring local communities, or allowing credits to sit in opaque private registries have all harmed confidence in nature-based finance. To avoid those pitfalls, the Deep Dive highlighted safeguards: rigorous measurement methods, independent auditing, transparent registries, and local participation in governance. A certificate, in this design, becomes proof of something real — not a promise on paper.

Certificates, Not Credits

This is also why Bastelica advocates for using the term certificate over credit. Credits are often seen as a right to pollute; certificates signal a verified contribution to nature. They can stand on their own, or complement other instruments such as green bonds, payments for ecosystem services, or insurance schemes — acting as evidence that biodiversity gains have actually occurred.

Momentum for such mechanisms is growing. The European Commission’s Roadmap for Nature Credits (2024) calls for new tools that align investment, regulation and ecological science. Through its pilots, BIO-CAPITAL is helping shape what that future could look like: biodiversity outcomes that are measurable, verifiable, investment-ready — and worthy of public trust.

How can mainstream financial markets help regenerate ecosystems? In the fourth BIO-CAPITAL Deep Dive, Isabel Reuss of ITASIF made the case that bonds — one of the oldest and most conventional instruments in finance — may hold one of the most promising paths.

At their core, bonds are simple. Instead of taking a loan from a bank, governments, cities, companies or international institutions borrow money directly from investors. Those investors receive interest until the bond matures, and the issuer uses the capital to build roads, schools, infrastructure or innovation. Green bonds follow the same logic, but with a non-negotiable rule: the money must be spent on environmental projects.

In a market increasingly shaped by sustainability-minded investors, demand for these instruments has grown rapidly. They are regulated, widely understood, and highly liquid — a rare combination in the sustainability world. Yet despite their success, the share of green bonds dedicated to biodiversity is still surprisingly small.

Enter Nature Bonds

That is why the arrival of nature bonds in 2024 marks an important shift. They are not simply green bonds with a new label. To qualify, 100% of the proceeds must go into biodiversity-related activities, and the bonds must align with global frameworks such as the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. In practice, this means direct financing for forest restoration, coastal and river ecosystems, wetland buffers, pollinator corridors, or even renewable energy projects that include biodiversity-positive design.

Nature bonds also come with strict expectations: transparent reporting, impact monitoring, third-party verification. In a sector where the risk of greenwashing is real, credibility matters — and the structure of these bonds is designed to earn trust from both investors and the public.

What This Means for BIO-CAPITAL

For BIO-CAPITAL, this matters for a simple reason: scale. Many biodiversity initiatives are small, local, and fragmented. A single forest, a pilot wetland, a cluster of farms — meaningful, but difficult to attract major long-term investment. Bonds can change that. They make it possible to combine projects into larger portfolios, open them to pension funds and institutional investors, and deliver capital at the size nature restoration actually requires.

Within BIO-CAPITAL, green and nature bonds form part of a broader financial architecture, alongside Payments for Ecosystem Services, parametric insurance and Triple Capital Accounting. Together, these tools create something that biodiversity projects very rarely have: a financing backbone that can expand beyond pilot sites, operate across regions, and bring nature restoration into the centre of financial markets.

Biodiversity provides clean water, fertile soils, flood protection, pollination and carbon storage. Yet despite their importance, these ecosystem services rarely appear in financial systems. In BIO-CAPITAL’s Deep Dive #03, the AgroSolutions team — Romane Jubera, Gaëtan Leboucher, Gabrielle Gros-Chapelier and Lorette Lorand — explored how Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) can help change that.

PES schemes financially reward land managers for practices that sustain or enhance ecosystem services: planting hedgerows, restoring grasslands, reducing pesticide use, or protecting forests and wetlands. The principle is simple: those who benefit from nature contribute to those who protect it. Funding can come from public actors such as water agencies and ministries, from private companies like food processors or utilities, or through hybrid models that combine both.

Europe-Wide Lessons From Real PES Schemes

Payments may be tied directly to the actions farmers take, or to measured ecological outcomes. In Europe, most schemes still focus on practices rather than results, largely because biodiversity is complex and costly to quantify in a precise and verifiable way.

AgroSolutions examined 20 PES schemes from France, Denmark, the UK and beyond. Although their goals varied, many focused on improving water quality, regenerating soils, restoring wetlands, safeguarding forests, or supporting agroecological transitions. Financing structures ranged from water taxes to regional funds and private sector contributions. Contract durations were typically three to five years — long enough to test practices while allowing renewal and adaptation. Some schemes even combined multiple goals, linking biodiversity outcomes to carbon storage or soil health.

Challenges on the Ground – and What Works Better

However, PES projects face common obstacles: administrative complexity, difficulties in securing long-term funding, high monitoring costs, and limited uptake when incentives are too low. Successful models tend to reduce transaction costs, work with local cooperatives or authorities to build trust, combine public and private finance, focus on a small number of clearly defined ecosystem services and use digital monitoring tools (such as sensors or satellite data) to make verification more efficient. Multi-year commitments also help give farmers confidence to change their practices.

Within BIO-CAPITAL, PES does not stand alone. It connects directly to other financial mechanisms. In Triple Capital Accounting , PES revenue can be recorded as an investment in natural capital. Paired with parametric insurance, which provides rapid payouts if disasters damage restored areas, PES becomes part of a broader financial safety net. Together, these instruments create a system in which protecting nature is not just ecologically beneficial — but economically viable, stable and investable.

Imagine a company that reports a profit — but only because its activities depleted a wetland, polluted a river, or pushed soil beyond recovery. Traditional accounting would still call that “success,” because the only thing it measures is money.
In BIO-CAPITAL’s second Deep Dive, Diana Tomakh (GND Partners) introduced a framework that challenges this logic. Triple Capital Accounting asks a simple question with consequences: What if financial results also reflected the value of nature and communities?

From Single Capital to Three

Classic accounting sees only one kind of capital: financial. TCA adds two that have been invisible for decades: Natural capital — forests, soils, rivers, biodiversity, all the systems that make life possible, and Social capital — people’s wellbeing, local livelihoods, equity, safety, and the resilience of communities. Suddenly, a restored grassland, a wetland that prevents flooding, or a farm that stops relying on pesticides are no longer “externalities.” They become part of the value a company creates.

When a Forest Becomes a Line Item

Tomakh used concrete examples to show what this looks like in practice. A forest in the Alps isn’t just scenery — it captures carbon, prevents erosion, protects villages from landslides. In the UK, a wetland doesn’t simply store water — it prevents floods, filters pollutants, creates habitat. TCA measures those benefits and turns them into financial information.

The moment nature is quantified, it can enter the conversations where decisions are made: investments, risk models, project evaluation, and balance sheets. Or as Tomakh put it: “The language of business is finance. If we monetise biodiversity and social wellbeing, we bring them into boardrooms.”

A Bridge Between Ecology and Finance

And that is the point. Triple Capital Accounting is not about turning nature into numbers for fun — it’s about making ecological reality visible to an economic system that currently rewards destruction more easily than restoration.

Within BIO-CAPITAL, the framework connects scientific data with financial tools like payments for ecosystem services, insurance models, nature bonds and biodiversity certificates. It allows investors to see which projects genuinely regenerate ecosystems, and which only claim to.

When nature shows up in financial reporting, two things happen: it becomes comparable — and it becomes protectable.

The first BIO-CAPITAL Deep Dive opened with Ahmet Rasim Demirtaş of Agcurate BV, who offered a striking perspective on a financial tool not usually associated with ecology: insurance. But in a world of more frequent storms, droughts and floods, he argued, insurance can become a mechanism not just for compensation, but for conservation.

Traditional insurance waits for damage to occur and then sends assessors to calculate losses — a slow and often disputed process. Parametric insurance works differently. It relies on objective, measurable environmental data: rainfall below a certain level, wind above a threshold, rivers overtopping their banks. When the data crosses the trigger, the payout is automatic. No forms. No inspections. No delays.

From Climate Shocks to Safety Nets

Demirtaş described how this speed and transparency can make a crucial difference for nature. In Alpine forests, for example, a storm can wipe out trees that were storing carbon and generating revenue through carbon credits. A rapid insurance payout allows restoration to begin immediately, keeping the project viable. Farmers shifting to regenerative practices often face short-term yield losses; insurance can cushion that financial risk and give them confidence to stay the course. And in wetlands or grasslands, where floods can destroy years of ecological restoration, parametric payouts can finance repairs the moment water levels spike.

Within BIO-CAPITAL, parametric models are not viewed in isolation. They sit alongside other tools such as Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) and Triple Capital Accounting, creating a financial architecture designed to reward long-term stewardship while protecting projects against sudden shocks. Insurance becomes both an enabler — encouraging people to adopt nature-positive practices — and a safety net, ensuring those efforts aren’t wiped out in a single disaster.

From Coral Reefs to an Idea and Concept

What once sounded experimental is already becoming real. Coral reefs in Mexico are insured against hurricane damage; mangroves in the Caribbean are protected through parametric triggers linked to storm events; wetlands in China are covered against droughts, floods and wildfires. The idea is spreading: biodiversity is an asset, and like any asset, it can be protected.

Demirtaş’ message was direct: if we want nature-based solutions to scale, we must make them financially resilient. Parametric insurance does exactly that — turning environmental risk into measurable triggers, and ecological restoration into something investors can trust will endure.