The 30^th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) was held under the shadow of an absent United States. At the same time, oil producing countries strongly opposed the inclusion of a commitment to phase out fossil fuels in the final agreement, resulting in less public attention than in previous years. Some voices even argued that weak decarbonization results call into question the need for an energy transition. Yet COP30 was not entirely without outcomes. Setting aside the politically sensitive energy agenda, which is deeply intertwined with geopolitics and economics, participating countries still reached a degree of consensus on financing for nature conservation and climate adaptation.

As the host of COP30, Brazil selected Belém, a city adjacent to the Amazon rainforest, aiming to focus the conference on tropical rainforests and nature conservation topics. The Amazon has long been described as the lungs of the Earth, yet it has faced sustained pressure from climate change. There are concerns that parts of the rainforest could gradually become savanna. Shrinking rainforest area not only weakens its carbon sink function, but also affects the rights and livelihoods of its indigenous communities.

Biodiversity protection also strengthens ecosystem resilience, which in turn improves forests’ carbon absorption and storage capacity. Over the past three decades, greenhouse gas emissions reductions strategies have largely emphasized the technological transition and energy efficiency, yet natural systems also play a critical role in stabilizing the climate depends, not only human action. For example, a research report by the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions notes that parallel national climate policies to strengthen biodiversity, such as restoring forest structure, establishing protected areas, and restoring wetlands, could reduce annual carbon emissions by roughly an additional 500 million tons.

This is why nature conservation was among the core themes of COP30, seeking nature-based solutions to climate change, and aiming to move from strategy to implementation, including mobilizing conservation funding. Brazil therefore proposed the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), with the goal of raising a USD 125 billion sustainability fund from capital markets. TFFF would support more than 1 billion hectares of tropical and subtropical forests in 74 developing countries, including the Amazon and Mekong basins, using the fund’s returns to provide stable financial support for forest conservation.

Beyond nature conservation, climate adaptation also requires substantial funding. COP30 adopted a target to double global climate adaptation finance to ensure an adequate response to increasingly frequent extreme events such as storms, floods, heatwaves, and droughts. Shortly after COP30 concluded, Southeast Asia experienced catastrophic flooding described as once-in-a-century, resulting in more than a thousand deaths, over a million displaced people, and enormous economic losses, highlighting the urgency of scaling up adaptation finance. Developed countries had already committed to providing USD 300 billion annually by no later than 2035 to support developing countries in addressing climate disasters at COP29 in 2024, but COP30 further increased the ambition of that goal.

Although the two funding agendas above appear different, both aim to direct capital to close the financing gap for sustainable development. In practice, despite years of calls for urgent investment in adaptation, adaptation finance has consistently lagged mitigation finance, with the gap sometimes exceeding a factor of two. The underlying reason is linked to financial viability. Mitigation projects such as renewable energy can generate cash flows through electricity sales, and have become popular investment targets. Adaptation finance, by contrast, often goes to disaster prevention, water resource management, and public health related infrastructure, with less cash flow generation. The same challenge applies to nature conservation, which has gained greater attention only in recent years. Because supporting institutional frameworks remain incomplete, fundraising has not expanded significantly. For instance, World Bank statistics indicate that only USD 5.8 billion was mobilized for forest restoration over the past decade.

It is therefore not surprising that many funding schemes related to adaptation and conservation carry a strong public sector character, whether through direct government budgets and subsidies, or through multinational aid mechanisms – such as the US-led Roadmap for a 21^st Century U.S. Pacific Island Partnership, which provides more than USD 810 million in assistance for climate adaptation and sustainable development in Pacific Island countries. Taiwan has also worked with partners such as the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, and Tuvalu to establish a climate transition fund; the Ministry of Foreign Affairs has committed USD 3 million over three years to help address the intensifying impacts from extreme climate events.

However, after President Trump returned to office, the US again announced its withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, and decided to step back from climate finance. Developing economies that relied on this funding are likely to be affected first – which was one of the main reasons COP30 focused on filling the gap. In addition to urging developed countries to continue honoring their finance commitments and potentially expand them, it also emphasized reforming the structure and liquidity of funding sources, and also on encouraging private investment, in order to reduce reliance on public funding. Blended finance, such as the proposed TFFF, was highlighted as a key approach.

Under the TFFF mechanism, the public sector provides initial capital. If the target fund size is USD 125 billion, the government might contribute USD 25 billion upfront, while the remaining USD 100 billion would be raised from private channels. This public-private structure is designed to send a positive signal to private capital, strengthen market confidence, and potentially allow public funds to share risk or absorb first losses, reducing uncertainty for private investors. The fund can then invest in financial assets to generate stable income, providing reliable long-term funding.

The use of blended finance to amplify the impact of public funds and “crowd in” private investment should be a key direction for the next phase of sustainable finance development for Taiwan. Taiwan already has longstanding mechanisms that resemble blended finance, such as credit guarantee funds and government incentive and subsidy programs. The Green Growth Fund, a TWD 10 billion initiative secured by the Ministry of Environment from the National Development Council at the end of 2024, belongs to this category. At present, funding has primarily focused on net zero and decarbonization, with less attention paid to climate adaptation and nature conservation, but Taiwan’s climate resilience could be strengthened if these areas were incorporated more deliberately.

Another critical challenge when it comes to financing nature conservation is assigning value to biodiversity: in other words, how to implement biocredits. This was also a key topic at COP30. The concept is similar to carbon credits, converting measurable biodiversity restoration outcomes into quantifiable and tradable units. In the United Kingdom, biocredit prices can reach GBP 42,000 per unit or higher. Prices tend to rise when protected species are more endangered or rarer, or when conservation expands to include habitats and broader ecosystems.

At present, biocredit calculation often uses a basket of metrics approach, consolidating multiple variables into a single index. For example, changes in the richness and variability of habitat species such as butterflies and bees may be aggregated into one indicator to assess ecological recovery on agricultural land. Even with using such methods, biocredits face criticism. Biodiversity is broader than carbon emissions, involving complex factors such as species, ecosystems, and evolution. Ecological characteristics also vary widely by region, making it difficult to define a universally applicable standard. Measuring recovery in tropical rainforests versus polar regions is fundamentally different. Unlike carbon credits, which can use tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, biodiversity measurement depends on geographic boundaries, baseline timing, and the definition of validity periods. To date, there is no widely accepted, verifiable, and transparent set of indicators and monitoring mechanisms across countries.

In other words, because measurement and verification systems are not yet complete, biocredits cannot develop markets at scales comparable to carbon markets, nor can they easily link to financial instruments. If Taiwan intends to mobilize more private funding for nature conservation, it will need to overcome key hurdles including alignment with international scientific metrics, more complete domestic biodiversity databases, and the gradual reinforcement of a biocredit framework.

The author is Chief Research Fellow at the Institute of Financial Research, TABF.