The Biodiversity Investment Facility: De-Risking Nature Investments in Southern Africa

Organizers: UNDP & the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA)

Date and time: Tuesday 27 October 2026, 14:00

Location: Blue Zone, Business & Finance Hub

Format: presentation of the facility followed by a roundtable discussion, moderated, with time reserved for audience Q&A.

Objectives

• Demonstrate how DFIs can mobilise institutional and private capital, and share lessons from Africa’s emerging biodiversity finance initiatives.
• Introduce the Biodiversity Investment Facility (BIF) to a broad community of investors, donors, DFIs and philanthropic partners, positioning it as an emerging platform for biodiversity and nature-positive investment in South Africa and the wider SADC region.
• Demonstrate proof of concept through DBSA-supported mechanisms already active in the market, notably the Cape Water Outcomes-Based Bond, showing that nature-positive, outcomes-linked finance is investable today, not only in theory.
• Build momentum toward capitalisation, opening dialogue with prospective funders and co-investors on how they might engage with the Facility as it moves from feasibility to launch.

Event Description

Africa hosts approximately one-quarter of the world’s biodiversity, yet receives only a small fraction of global biodiversity finance. The financing gap continues to widen while countries seek to implement ambitious National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), restore degraded ecosystems, build climate resilience, and deliver on the targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework.

Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) have a unique opportunity to bridge this gap by deploying innovative financial instruments that reduce investment risk, crowd in private capital, and finance projects that generate measurable biodiversity, climate and socio-economic outcomes. The Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) has been developing several pioneering financing mechanisms aimed at mobilising capital towards nature-positive development, including biodiversity investment facilities, outcome-based financing, guarantees, blended finance platforms and natural infrastructure investments. As Parties gather at COP17 to assess collective implementation progress under the Global Biodiversity Framework, there is a timely opportunity to move discussions beyond policy commitments towards practical investment solutions capable of delivering biodiversity outcomes at scale.

This session introduces the Biodiversity Investment Facility (BIF), a new blended-finance vehicle being developed by the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) in partnership with UNDP to mobilise large-scale capital into biodiversity-positive and climate-resilient investments across South Africa and the wider SADC region. Across Southern Africa, ecological infrastructure – healthy catchments, wetlands and rangelands – underpins the water, agricultural and municipal systems that regional economies depend on. As climate change intensifies these pressures, biodiversity loss is increasingly understood not as a peripheral environmental concern but as a material financial risk to infrastructure, food systems and public balance sheets across the region. Blended-finance facilities such as the BIF respond directly to this reality, pairing concessional and commercial capital to de-risk early-stage restoration and resilience projects to the point where they become investable.

For investors and donors, global appetite for nature-positive investment is rising quickly, driven by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and the realization of the financial materiality of biodiversity risk. Yet across the region, capital availability is rarely the binding constraint – the scarcer resource is a pipeline of well-structured, de-risked, investable biodiversity projects. The BIF is designed to close precisely this gap, deploying first-loss capital, guarantees and technical assistance to convert early-stage projects into bankable transactions, and opening new asset classes, including biodiversity credits and outcomes-linked thematic bonds, as investable propositions in their own right.

Such mechanisms have already demonstrated the potential of attracting institutional capital today, not only in theory. For example, the Cape Water Outcomes-Based Bond, backed by a DBSA grant and structured by Rand Merchant Bank, was issued in 2026 as a R2.5 billion instrument to channel outcomes-based investment into invasive-species clearing and catchment restoration to strengthen water security in the Western Cape.

During the event, panellists will discuss what the transaction signals for the wider pipeline of investable biodiversity projects across Southern Africa, and how investors and donors can engage with the BIF as it advances toward capitalisation. A number of case studies of DBSA-supported transactions will be explored, as the Cape Water Outcomes-Based Bond, Ecological Infrastructure Financing, Nature-positive infrastructure investments, Guarantee facilities for nature investments, and Community-based conservation finance. The session will close with an open discussion on partnership and co-investment opportunities around the Biodiversity Investment Facility.

Target audience

The roundtable will convene a targeted group of senior representatives from:

• Institutional capital: pension funds, insurers, asset managers and impact investors.
• Financial institutions: commercial banks, investment banks, development finance institutions and multilateral development banks.
• Catalytic capital providers: climate and biodiversity funds, philanthropic foundations, family offices and donor organisations.
• Strategic partners: organisations specialising in guarantees, blended finance, outcomes-based finance, nature finance and impact measurement.

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