Webinar "Biodiversity Finance and the Resilience Thinking"

BIOFIN Mexico's National Coordinator, Mariana Bellot, participated as a speaker in the 'Introduction to Resilience Development' MOOC. Specifically, she presented the seminar "Biodiversity Finance and the Resilience Thinking". 

Resilient thinking provides a comprehensive framework through which it is possible to analyze BIOFIN Mexico's progress and to understand the resilience principles through the financing scope. 

During the webinar, the discussion raised important points such as the importance of having macroeconomic indicators that reflect the natural capital value in development. The lack of this indicators limits the development scope and as a result, the importance of investing in ecosystem services is not stressed. Another challenge is to internalize the costs caused by biodiversity loss. 

Some of the resilience thinking principles that were linked with BIOFIN's lessons learned and processes were: 

Principle one: Maintain diversity and redundancy

While this principles emphasizes the importance of having different components, in the BIOFIN process it can be translated to in order to understand the biodiversity challenges, the diversity of financing sources is highly needed. Not being able to diversify finance sources increases the vulnerability of the mechanisms that provide resources, and ultimately increases the vulnerability of biodiversity conservation. In the case of Mexico, during the Biodiversity Expenditure Review, BIOFIN found that there was a diversity of actors that were investing in biodiversity, not only the environmental sector. 

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Principle two: Manage connectivity

Well-connected systems can recover more quickly. In this sense, in order to improve the coordination of resources in the landscapes, good connectivity between institutions and sectors is needed. Connectivity between policies is fundamental to improve the integrated landscape management. 

Principle four: Foster complex adaptive systems thinking
To illustrate this principle, BIOFIN Mexico has been working on impact investment as one of its prioritized finance solution. Impact investment provides this integral view that is shared with this particular principle. 

​Principle five: Encourage learning

One of the most important lessons of the BIOFIN project, at least in Mexico, is that if we do not understand how the public budget works, it will be harder to argue why it is important to invest in biodiversity. Therefore, a key task of BIOFIN has been to build capacities among the stakeholders that deal with biodiversity. For instance, to connect and encourage environmental learning in the financial sector has been a key achievement. And also giving the environmental sector some skills and encourage viewing biodiversity through the finance lens. BIOFIN has encourage the learning and connection of these sectors through the inclusion of the vision of the Financial Needs Assessment. 

Principle six: Broaden participation

BIOFIN has helped broaden the participation of different sectors and actors to identify and develop the financing solutions for biodiversity. For example, people from all kinds of sectors that were not included in the conversation before, are now key stakeholders in the implementation of solutions; such as development banks, private sector, and the financial sector overall. This is particularly important because in an interdisciplinary group there are different sets of ideas and points of view that are essential to solve the finance and environmental challenges in general. 

Principle seven: Promote polycentric governance

Promoting the polycentric governance is essential to streghten biodiversity management and mainstream biodiversity in other sectors. Effective and constant interinstitutional coordination is a key factor to have a resilient system and to mainstream biodiversity within the public policies of various sectors. 

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