Trends in biodiversity finance terminology, actors and networks over two decades

The Global Biodiversity Framework aims to shift financial flows into biodiversity by at least $700 billion per annum by 2030 and emphasises the role of the private sector in addressing the ‘biodiversity finance gap’. Here we apply a novel systematic review method to non-academic (‘grey’) literature coupled with natural language processing and social network analysis to identify trends in biodiversity finance terminology, actors and networks between 2000 to 2022. Our results illustrate the recent explosion in biodiversity finance grey literature since 2020, and increased prevalence of financial over conservation terminology. Text analysis shows the frequency with which mechanisms for generating private investment in nature are mentioned is greatly disproportionate to estimates of their current and projected role in overall biodiversity financing. Our findings highlight the growth in number and diversity of biodiversity finance actors over time, while also pointing to the centrality of a powerful few in driving financialised discourses.