AfDB Urges African Governments to Prioritise Biodiversity Funding and Conservation

The African Development Bank (AfDB) has called on African governments to make biodiversity conservation a national investment priority and commit adequate resources to implementing environmental protection programmes.

Arona Soumare, the bank’s Chief Climate Change and Green Growth Officer, made the call during a panel discussion on the sidelines of the 17th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP17) in Yerevan, Armenia.

The discussion, organised by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), focused on the progress, funding gaps and opportunities identified in Africa’s seventh national reports on implementing the Global Biodiversity Framework.

Soumare said many African governments approached development financiers for infrastructure, food security and other priorities without making biodiversity conservation a central part of their investment proposals. He argued that countries needed to move beyond commitments under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and demonstrate their resolve through concrete funding decisions.

“Most of the time, African countries are not pushing the bank. There’s a big pool of projects we have met so far coming from the outsiders. You barely see an African country coming to us with a good and sound proposal on biodiversity,” he said.

He identified fragmented financing across development sectors as a major obstacle, urging governments to incorporate biodiversity into their Country Strategy Papers, which guide the African Development Bank’s engagement with individual countries and shape its investment portfolios.

According to Soumare, conservation should be linked to broader national objectives, including infrastructure development, food security and livelihoods, rather than treated as a separate concern. Citing Madagascar as an example, he said country allocations could support private-sector initiatives for national parks and help attract additional funding.

He also called for more flexible financing arrangements that would support both large conservation programmes and smaller community-led initiatives. Although the bank provides funding opportunities for grassroots organisations, he said demand significantly exceeds available resources.

“When I have a call for proposals, I’ll be able to fund maybe three out of 10 applications I’m getting,” Soumare said.

To close the funding gap, he advocated blended finance combining domestic resources with international funding, alongside green banks, green lines of credit and other financial intermediaries. He also highlighted nature-related bonds as another potential way to attract investment from financial markets.

Speaking during the same discussion, Daniel Mukubi of the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development said inadequate financing continued to constrain the implementation of biodiversity commitments across the continent.

Mukubi noted that conservation programmes often competed with urgent national needs, including energy, infrastructure, food security and poverty reduction. He said regional cooperation could help countries share expertise and strengthen institutional capacity.

He cited training for technical experts in geographic information systems (GIS) and biodiversity mapping as an example of cooperation that could improve regional planning. Such efforts, he said, could support the global 30-by-30 target, which aims to conserve at least 30 per cent of the world’s land, inland waters, coastal areas and marine areas by 2030.

The AfDB’s call highlights the need for African governments to translate biodiversity commitments into funded national programmes, while strengthening partnerships that can help conservation initiatives attract investment and deliver results.