South Africa biodiversity finance demands took center stage in Nairobi this month, as Pretoria used the final major negotiating session before October’s UN Biodiversity Conference to press developing-world concerns that have simmered since the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted in 2022. Speaking on behalf of both the African Group and the Group of Like-Minded Megadiverse Countries at the seventh meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation, held in Nairobi, Kenya, from 4 to 12 August, South Africa argued that global ambition on nature protection means little without the money, technology, and institutional capacity to back it up.
The stakes behind the South Africa biodiversity finance push are considerable. Target 19(a) of the Kunming-Montreal framework calls for international biodiversity finance flows to developing countries to reach at least USD 20 billion annually by 2025, rising to USD 30 billion by 2030. According to reporting from the talks, that 2025 milestone was likely missed, with countries continuing to cite gaps in financing, technology transfer, and technical support as barriers to turning commitments into action. The UN’s own assessment of the negotiations put the imbalance in stark terms: the world currently spends roughly 30 times more destroying nature than it does protecting it, according to Astrid Schomaker, the Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, who noted that Africa hosts a quarter of the planet’s biodiversity while facing some of the sharpest climate impacts and the thinnest financial cushion to respond.
South Africa’s position was not an isolated complaint, and it reflects a South Africa biodiversity finance stance that has been consistent across recent multilateral forums. A delegate speaking on behalf of the African Union told the Nairobi meeting that adequate, predictable, and accessible financial resources are essential conditions for developing countries to translate global commitments into concrete national action, adding that ambition alone is not enough without commensurate means. That framing runs through the entire South Africa biodiversity finance agenda: Pretoria backed continued oversight of the Cali Fund, the mechanism meant to channel benefits from commercial use of genetic data back to the countries and communities that host the biodiversity in question, and insisted that contribution thresholds should not be allowed to weaken it. South Africa also pushed for non-monetary benefits — access to technology, scientific cooperation, and research findings — to count alongside direct payments.
Where South Africa’s intervention becomes more distinctly practical — and where the South Africa biodiversity finance case sharpens into something more than an abstract funding ask — is in how it linked biodiversity policy to the sectors that actually generate African livelihoods: mining, agriculture, fisheries, and tourism. Pretoria argued that conservation gains are more durable when woven into economic policy rather than treated as a parallel track, a position that echoes a broader continental conversation about how Africa values its natural assets. At the African Development Bank’s 2026 Annual Meetings in Brazzaville, experts put a number on what is at stake: Africa’s natural resources are worth an estimated $6 trillion, much of it uncounted in how the continent’s economies are currently measured. The World Economic Forum has put the global opportunity even higher, estimating that a nature-positive economic transition could unlock more than $10 trillion in annual business activity worldwide by 2030 — a case for treating conservation as an appreciating asset rather than a cost center, and one that dovetails with South Africa’s insistence at SBI-7 that mining, fisheries, and tourism revenue and biodiversity protection are not competing priorities.
South Africa also used the Nairobi platform to advance parts of the South Africa biodiversity finance and capacity-building agenda that extend beyond direct payments. On behalf of the African Group, it welcomed a draft global plan of action for education on biodiversity, securing acknowledgment in the text of South Africa’s own hosting of the 2026 global celebration of the International Day for Biological Diversity, held under the theme “Acting Locally for Global Impact.” Pretoria also highlighted the technical and scientific support center hosted by the South African National Biodiversity Institute, pressing for it to be fully operationalized as part of wider capacity-building efforts across the continent — the kind of infrastructure that, alongside frameworks like the carbon and green-finance platforms taking shape elsewhere in West Africa, signals a continent trying to build the institutional plumbing for climate and biodiversity finance simultaneously rather than treating each as a separate negotiating track.
Not every issue at SBI-7 moved toward consensus, and the unresolved items matter as much to the South Africa biodiversity finance agenda as the ones where agreement was reached. South Africa cautioned against the global review of KMGBF implementation creating new reporting obligations for countries already stretched thin, insisting that findings be read against national circumstances and development priorities rather than applied as a uniform yardstick. On the more contentious question of the multilateral mechanism for digital sequence information — the legal architecture determining how companies compensate countries for using genetic data drawn from their biodiversity — significant differences remain unresolved, and will now travel with the rest of the SBI-7 outcomes to COP17.
That handoff to Yerevan is where the South Africa biodiversity finance argument will face its real test. Negotiators have nine weeks to convert the recommendations that emerged from Nairobi into decisions with teeth, and South Africa has signaled it intends to keep pressing the same points it raised at SBI-7: predictable financing, protected benefit-sharing mechanisms, and a review process that respects the different starting points of the countries being reviewed. It is the same underlying question shaping ongoing continental debate over how African governments balance conservation, growth, and diplomacy — and one with knock-on effects for sectors, including conservation-driven tourism that depends on the very ecosystems under negotiation, that rely on healthy, well-financed natural landscapes to function at all. Whether COP17 delivers financing commitments that actually close the gap between the $20 billion pledged for 2025 and what was likely delivered will determine whether Africa’s quarter-share of the world’s biodiversity finally comes with a quarter-share of the resources needed to protect it.
