5.1.1 Objectives
The FNA aims to make a comprehensive estimate of the financial resources needed to achieve national and subnational biodiversity targets. National biodiversity targets are typically articulated in biodiversity plans and other key national planning instruments, such as national development plans, sectoral development plans and climate change plans. The FNA compares these financial needs to projected biodiversity expenditures over a medium- to long-term planning horizon as part of an assessment of unmet financing needs.
The FNA seeks to specifically:
Clarify strategies and actions in national biodiversity plans (i.e. NBSAPs) to describe “costable actions” that link to expected biodiversity results in a logical framework that lends itself to prioritization and detailed costing.
Cost actions by defining unit costs and quantities over the target time period.
Detailed technical proposals to operationalize prioritized biodiversity finance solutions;
Prioritize biodiversity strategies and actions based on specific biodiversity and cost criteria.
Estimate unmet biodiversity financing needs.
The CBD produced high-level estimates of the financing necessary to achieve the Aichi Biodiversity Targets on a global level (see Chapter 1). In contrast with this global assessment, the FNA is a bottom-up approach seeking to produce a detailed and realistic costing of the targets in national biodiversityrelated strategies and action plans. This approach is meant to answer the question: “What financing is really needed for the country to achieve its stated biodiversity targets?” It starts from zero and builds a costing estimate of the full set of human resources, capital investments and financial resources needed. It is aspirational in that it identifies the necessary resources required for effective delivery, even if this may not be immediately achievable in practice.
Each country may have its own approach to medium- and long-term costing. The BIOFIN process should seek to support the existing approaches to ensure compatibility and alignment. In many countries, environmental budgets are vague and not based on detailed cost estimates on the investment needed to achieve prioritized targets. Hence they lack strong justification, lessening their ability to garner the support from ministries of finance and other budgetary decision makers. This has especially been the case with traditional NBSAPs, most of which never included detailed budgets or costing estimates at all. As a result, finance for NBSAPs was rarely adequate, and their results correspondingly poor. This is why the CBD has encouraged countries to apply an FNA-type approach to develop a detailed and realistic resource needs assessment and budgets for their NBSAPs.
