Making Nature Visible in Finance: Building Capacity of the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas on Nature-related Risks

Around the world, financial systems are beginning to reckon with a long-standing reality: nature matters to the economy. The state of biodiversity influences economic performance, while economic decisions, in turn, affect ecosystems. Sometimes these connections are visible, but more often they remain hidden within complex supply chains, financial assets, and risk exposures.

Yet invisibility does not mean insignificance. Biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, and the disruption of ecosystem services are increasingly affecting economic productivity and financial stability. As a result, banks, insurers, and investors are becoming exposed to risks that are still poorly understood.

In response, global momentum is growing around nature-related financial disclosures, frameworks designed to reveal the often-hidden links between nature and finance. These disclosures help institutions identify their dependencies on nature, their impacts on ecosystems, and their exposure to nature-related risks and opportunities. By translating the relationship between business and nature into usable data, they enable financial institutions to incorporate biodiversity considerations into risk management, investment decisions, and policymaking.

A key initiative advancing this work is the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), which provides guidance and a structured framework for institutions to identify, assess, and report nature-related risks and opportunities.

For central banks and financial regulators, these developments are particularly significant. As nature-related risks increasingly manifest within economic and financial systems, regulators are exploring how to integrate them into existing supervisory and regulatory frameworks. The message is becoming clearer: financial resilience cannot be separated from ecological resilience.

In a biodiverse country like the Philippines, where environmental risks are significant, nature-related disclosures are not only relevant but increasingly necessary. At the national level, this direction is reinforced under Target 15 of the Philippine Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (PBSAP) 2024–2040, which calls on businesses and financial institutions to assess, disclose, and reduce their biodiversity-related risks and impacts. As global disclosure frameworks gain traction, strengthening institutional capacity in this area has become both timely and important.

Efforts to advance nature-related disclosures in the Philippines are supported by the Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN) Philippines, a project of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources – Biodiversity Management Bureau (DENR-BMB). In recent years, BIOFIN Philippines has worked to raise awareness of emerging disclosure frameworks, particularly the TNFD, through engagement with financial institutions and targeted capacity-building initiatives.

The Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP) recognizes that climate- and environment-related risks can pose material threats to monetary and financial stability. This recognition has informed BSP’s ongoing efforts to better understand and integrate nature-related considerations into its policymaking and supervisory functions. In 2023, BSP published a study titled The Impact of Biodiversity Loss on the Philippine Banking System: A Preliminary Analysis, which highlights the importance of assessing not only direct financial exposures but also the broader dependencies of the financial system on biodiversity and ecosystem services.

Building on this growing institutional focus, UNDP BIOFIN and the TNFD Secretariat organized a one-and-a-half-day internal training session with BSP on 20–21 January 2026. The training brought together 28 technical staff from policy, research, and supervisory units across the BSP to explore how nature-related risks intersect with central banking functions.

Participants were introduced to practical tools and approaches for identifying nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks, and opportunities, and for integrating these considerations into financial supervision and policy development. To connect theory with practice, speakers from the World Bank and the Philippine Geothermal Production Company (PGPC), one of the Philippines’ early TNFD adopters, shared their experiences in applying nature-related risk frameworks within financial and corporate decision-making.

While nature-related disclosures remain largely voluntary, global interest in and adoption of these frameworks continues to grow. Even in the absence of formal requirements, financial institutions and particular regulators are increasingly recognizing the value of understanding their relationship with nature.

As awareness and institutional readiness expand, financial systems will be better equipped to manage nature-related risks and integrate biodiversity considerations into decision-making, helping make nature visible within the financial system.