Assessment of Financing for Biodiversity Conservation in Mexico. Links between Biodiversity and Climate Change Adaptation Funds

At COP16 in Cali, Colombia, significant progress was made in biodiversity conservation efforts, in this regard, financing has been considered a key issue for the achievement of the objectives. The over-view of Mexico’s experience with biodiversity finance in this study pre-sents the experience of an emerging economy, which must finance pressing development priorities and biodiversity and climate action at the same time. Therefore it is very important to find synergies in the available finance and look for new innovative options The large overlap between the climate and biodiversity agendas and the international commitments derived from these also presents an op-portunity to accelerate biodiversity funding. The methodology applied is the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) The study presents the na-tional strategy on biodiversity in Mexico (ENBioMex), the financial needs of the country, and the existing biodiversity financing, stressing of GEF, BIOFIN, and the Adaptation Fund in Mexico. The discussion section centers on analyzing the existing results and outlining some proposals to enhance the existing instruments, looking for innovation and synergies. In authors´ opinion, the financing of Ecosystem based Adaptation (EbA) is the main instrument that can link biodiversity con-servation and the adaptation to climate change impacts, at the same time providing a sustainable way of life and guaranteeing the well-be-ing of the communities but is not adequately used. Finally we present some concluding remarks and some future topics of research.