Guyana’s vice president has urged a 142-member biodiversity alliance to put its weight behind existing United Nations targets and concentrate on practical ways to finance them, rather than establish a separate framework. Speaking at the alliance’s second conference in Georgetown, he placed the shortage of nature finance at the centre of his appeal.
The vice president said the alliance had expanded from 17 members to 142. His message was that this broader membership should strengthen support for the Convention on Biological Diversity, not become a basis for setting competing targets. The call concerned how the alliance should organise its efforts; it did not establish a new binding international agreement.
That distinction matters to the conference’s central question: how to turn support for biodiversity into workable financial arrangements. The vice president’s position was that the alliance should help advance the existing UN framework while addressing the difficulties of raising money, rather than devote its efforts to creating another set of goals.
Finance obstacles
He cited a public-finance gap of about US$700 billion and pointed to the absence of a major market for biodiversity credits, whether based on compliance requirements or voluntary participation. These were presented as constraints on financing nature, alongside a more basic unresolved issue: a lack of agreement on what form a biodiversity credit should take.
The remarks distinguished the need for funding from the mechanisms that might deliver it. A stated finance gap does not itself provide a means of closing that gap, while the idea of biodiversity credits does not amount to an established large-scale market. The vice president called for practical solutions against that backdrop.
His appeal therefore brought together two priorities: maintaining support for agreed international biodiversity targets and finding ways to mobilise finance behind them. The alliance’s growth was part of his case for a stronger collective effort, but the membership figure was not presented as evidence that the financial barriers had already been overcome.
The discussion of credits also left an important limit in view. Without agreement on their form, the conference remarks did not describe a settled biodiversity-credit model. Nor did the call for finance announce that a major compliance or voluntary market had been created. The emphasis remained on work needed to make financing practical.
Village financing experience
A separate contribution at the same conference focused on carbon finance reaching Indigenous communities. The chairman of the national council of Indigenous village leaders said direct transfers were funding more than 3,000 village projects and supporting employment, culture and local economies. Those benefits and the project total were claims made by the chairman.
The project figure should not be read as a confirmed total of completed schemes. It was used to describe the scale of village activity linked to carbon-finance transfers, without resolving the status of every project. The chairman’s account highlighted community-level uses of financing rather than providing an independently audited assessment of outcomes.
The two contributions addressed different aspects of the financing debate. The vice president stressed the obstacles facing biodiversity finance and the need to support UN targets. The council chairman described how carbon-finance transfers were being used locally. Carbon-financed village projects were not presented as proof that a biodiversity-credit market already existed.
The central appeal from Georgetown was for the enlarged alliance to concentrate on backing existing targets and developing practical financing solutions. The conference remarks set out that policy direction and described local experience, while leaving the finance gap and the unresolved structure of biodiversity credits as challenges still to be addressed.
