In February 2025, at resumed COP16 talks in Rome, governments adopted the first global strategy for closing what the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework calculates as a $700 billion annual biodiversity financing gap between now and 2030. The plan splits that gap into two parts: roughly $500 billion a year is meant to come from redirecting existing subsidies that currently harm nature — fossil fuel and agricultural subsidies chief among them — toward less damaging alternatives, while the remaining $200 billion a year is meant to be newly mobilized from public and private sources combined. A separate target commits developed countries to channel at least $20 billion a year to developing countries by 2025, rising to $30 billion by 2030[1]. Progress against that target is real but still small relative to the gap: the UN Development Programme's Biodiversity Finance Initiative reports having helped partner governments unlock just over $2.7 billion in nature finance in 2025, up from $1.7 billion the year before[2] — a meaningful increase, and also a rounding error against $700 billion.
Where the money that does exist actually goes
How much total funding exists is only half the picture. A 2025 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examined 14,566 conservation projects funded between 1992 and 2016, totalling roughly $1.963 billion, and found the money distributed with a consistency that has little to do with ecological need. Vertebrates — a small slice of total described species — received 82.9 percent of all funding, while plants and invertebrates received 6.6 percent each, and fungi and algae received less than 0.2 percent combined[3]. Within the vertebrate share, the imbalance sharpens further: birds and mammals together absorbed 85 percent of vertebrate funding, while amphibians — one of the most threatened vertebrate classes on Earth — received just 2.8 percent[3]. Reptile funding shows perhaps the starkest example of concentration: more than a thousand reptile species are formally classified as threatened, yet 87 percent of all reptile conservation funding in the study period went to just seven species of marine turtle[3]. The study's authors conclude bluntly that charisma and body size are the strongest predictors of which species get funded — better predictors, in fact, than extinction risk itself — and that nearly 94 percent of species formally identified as threatened received no conservation funding at all during the period studied[3].
A geographic mismatch layered on top of the taxonomic one
The bias is not only about which species get attention; it is also about where. Research examining global patterns in wildlife tracking and monitoring — a reasonable proxy for where sustained conservation investment is happening — found that as much as 95 percent of well-resourced animal-tracking studies take place in politically stable, high-income, largely English-speaking countries, rather than in the countries that hold the greatest concentrations of at-risk biodiversity[4]. That pattern compounds a structural problem: many of the world's recognized biodiversity hotspots sit in the Global South, in countries where conservation work is frequently constrained by exactly the capital shortages the $700 billion financing gap describes, and international funding flows do not reliably track toward the places with the greatest documented need[5]. The practical effect is a double filter: a species is more likely to be funded if it is large, familiar and easy to photograph, and a place is more likely to be funded if it is easy and safe for well-resourced institutions to work in — two selection pressures that correlate only weakly, if at all, with where extinction risk is actually concentrated.
What "who funds it" ends up determining
None of this means existing conservation funding is wasted — flagship-species campaigns for elephants, tigers and marine turtles have produced real, measurable protections, and the habitat those species require often shelters far less visible co-occurring species as an incidental benefit. But the scale of the mismatch documented in the PNAS study — 94 percent of threatened species with no funding at all, fungi and algae receiving a rounding error's worth of the total — suggests that "more conservation funding" and "better-targeted conservation funding" are not the same problem, and closing the $700 billion gap will not by itself fix the second one. Funding follows donor visibility and familiarity more reliably than it follows an IUCN Red List category, and that pattern shows no clear sign of correcting itself as overall totals rise. Whoever ends up filling the financing gap the Global Biodiversity Framework describes will still face the older, harder question underneath it: funded for whom, and on whose account of what counts as worth saving.