As Prepared for Delivery
I am glad to have the opportunity to speak with you during COP16. Let me thank Minister Bonilla for the invitation and for Colombia’s many efforts to help deliver on this year’s theme: “Peace with Nature.”
As I discussed with Minister Muhamad and other ministers from Amazon Basin countries when I traveled to Belém in July, halting and reversing nature and biodiversity loss—and working towards the goal of conserving 30 percent of lands and waters—is an economic imperative. Healthy ecosystems support economic growth, including by creating and sustaining livelihoods. And they can have significant indirect economic benefits, such as lower health care costs and reduced damage from extreme weather events. Conversely, the current accelerating loss of nature and biodiversity presents significant economic challenges. Put simply, when we consider the full value that ecosystems provide, conserving and restoring nature is often the most economically sound approach.
This is why finance ministers have crucial roles to play, alongside many other partners. Part of our impact will come through financing investments in conservation and restoration. But this alone will not be sufficient. We also need to make sure our broader fiscal and economic policies don’t undermine our investments in ecosystems. In the United States, our work to make good on this vision includes considering how proposed regulations and investments impact the environment’s contributions to our wellbeing and developing national natural capital accounts to quantify the economic value of our natural assets.
Finance ministries also need to engage with the private sector to support businesses that drive economic growth and create good jobs while sustainably using natural resources.
And we need to move forward work through the international financial institutions, where supporting nature should be understood as critical to advancing sustainable development and achieving our climate goals.
We’ve seen important progress at the multilateral development banks, including the Inter-American Development Bank’s Amazonia Forever initiative, which is helping facilitate regional coordination and importantly recognizes the need to engage with and support Indigenous Peoples and local communities. We’ve also made progress at the climate and environment trust funds, such as delivering the largest ever replenishment of the Global Environment Facility in 2022 with a significant focus on biodiversity.
But there’s more work to do. The MDBs should provide increased support to governments looking to strengthen enabling environments for investments that support nature and biodiversity and should help develop new business models that mobilize more financing, including from the private sector. MDBs should also mainstream nature and biodiversity considerations across diverse sectors, from agriculture, to infrastructure, to water.
We should also take forward recommendations from the recently concluded independent review of the climate and environment finance architecture commissioned by Brazil’s G20 Presidency. It highlights that the climate and environment trust funds can deliver more impact if they work together as a system so that countries can develop cross-fund strategies, providing a way forward for work at the funds and within our own governments.
Let me end by emphasizing that finance ministries must also use the tools at our disposal to crack down on the individuals and organizations that abuse nature for their own financial gain. Nature crimes generate hundreds of billions of dollars each year, threatening ecosystems and harming local communities. In Belém in July, I announced the launch of the Amazon Region Initiative Against Illicit Finance, through which the United States is working with regional partners to pursue efforts to disrupt nature crimes. We must move this and many other efforts forward.
As we look ahead, I hope we can jointly renew our commitment to pursuing more action. The future of our planet, people, and economies depends on it.
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