Press Conference: Report Launch: Regulating Finance for Biodiversity: An Assessment for the Global Biodiversity Framework, UN Convention on Biodiversity - COP 17

recognizes communities as authors and actors of conservation, not as instruments for delivering conservation target. There can be no just biodiversity finance without epistemic justice. And there can be no lasting conservation if the people who sustain biodiversity are denied the power to shape its future. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Sori. So we have the last speaker.

Okay, thank you everyone. My name is Fikrman Saragi. I am from the People Coalition for Fisheries Justice as the new general secretariat, general secretaries. There are seven points that I want to say to you. The first one is now in Indonesia, indigenous people and local communities as the right holders that living in the coastal areas and small island are currently facing various challenges and injustice in Indonesia, such as mining, tourism, land reclamation, aquaculture, IUU fishing, national strategic project, and also conservation, that initiative by the government and also the private sectors. Second, land and marine tenure conflicts starts from the unmeaningful participation or manipulation participation and unfair political and policies justice policies on coastal and small island spatial planning. because due to a lack of recognition, IPLC, that base in spatial management, was deleted. From 2014 until 2025, Kiara documented there are 246 cases of coastal and small island communities that facing intimidation and also criminalization in connection with their efforts to defend their managed areas. And 30 of these related to the conservation areas in Indonesia. In the perspective of outsiders, coastal and marine areas are merely fishing just only for fishing grounds. But for the local people and Indonesian people, the sea is their life. They are living culture there. And also, there are local wisdoms, norms, and the way of fisherfolk that are living in the small island and the coastal areas. So the conservation The conservation management should prioritize community-led based management. As people know that their areas best and have established practices, cultures, and relationship with their territories. Now, We call for the rigorous protection and recognition of land and the tenure rights and the biodiversity management practices that rooted in the local wisdom and comprehensively included the rights, governance systems, cultures, and livelihoods of communities in the coastal, marine, and small island territories. We strongly reject all of the forms of natural resources extraction, particularly the critical minerals mining in the coastal and small island in Indonesia. In our perspective for COP17, all of the government must hear our recommendation. That is, one, recognize the rights managed areas and also the governance of communities in marine and coastal conservation. Second, ensure that indigenous people and local communities as the right holders are fully involved in decision making. Third, ensuring that marine conservation and also economic development must be protected, the rights and the livelihoods of the communities. Bring back the social justice and ecological justice. Now for the better future. Thank you.

Thank you. So as we conclude we want to make one thing absolutely clear. That the people's conservation summit declaration is not merely a collective recommendation. It is a collective demand and fundamental change in Indonesia's conservation policy and practices. We also Our message to our Indonesian government is also clear. Do not take the voice of the people to negotiating table only to leave their demands behind. Bring the rights, knowledge, and aspiration into decisions you make. You can also find the declarations of the people's conservation in the QR code below through your device. So thank you very much and see you again.

Are all these Indonesians your friends?

Yes.

Hello, welcome. My name is Laurel Sutherland. I work with Rainforest Action Network. And this press conference today is serving as the official launch of a new report by the Forests and Finance Coalition. The title of the report is Regulating Finance for Biodiversity, an assessment for the Global Biodiversity Framework 2026. And the bulk of this report examines financial regulations in 11 jurisdictions that play strategically important roles in the financing of forest risk commodities. Forest and Finance is an initiative by a coalition of about a dozen campaign and research organizations, a number of which are represented here today on this panel. The report itself is now available online in its entirety. It is over 100 pages, so we do have the executive summary available in printed form, which is just eight pages. And we're going to start today with Meryl van der Mark, who is the coordinator of the Forests and Finance Coalition. Meryl.

Thank you, Laurel. So last week, the Forests and Finance Coalition launched our yearly reports, Banking on Biodiversity Collapse, at the UN Principles for Responsible Investment. In this report, every year, we map and bring transparency to the financial flows to the largest tropical forest risk commodity companies. This year, we mapped over almost 600 billion US dollars flowing to soft and hard commodity companies operating in the tropical regions from 2020 till 2026. We also see a very worrying trend of increasing finance to these sectors. The beef sector increased by more than 50% since 2016. More worryingly, the soy sector and the pulp and paper sector have increased more than 100% since 2016. Especially the soy sector is worrying because there was a moratorium to protect the Amazon in place, which collapsed earlier this year. So there is very little restriction on the expansion of that sector, and it has huge impacts on the Amazon. The same is true for the hard mineral mining commodities, where we've also seen an increase of more than 55% since 2016, with nickel sector increasing 183% since 2016, which of course is having huge impacts in Indonesia, where nickel mining is causing a lot of social environmental impacts. And the lithium sector, which is lithium being used for the energy transition, has increased more than 1,000 times since 2016. So overall, we see a huge amount of money flowing to tropical forests with commodity companies. And at the same time, the banks and investors behind these flows have very poor policies. On average, they score only 25%. So there's not much in place to stop them from continuing these financial flows. And that is why we strongly believe we need stronger financial regulations to protect biodiversity. Thank you.

Thank you, Meryl. Our next speaker is Tom Picken, who is the Forest and Finance Policy Director with Rainforest Action Network.

Good morning, everybody, and thank you for joining us. So four years ago, governments adopted the Global Biodiversity Framework, including a commitment under Target 14 to align public and private financial flows with biodiversity goals. That was an important commitment because protecting biodiversity isn't simply about raising more money for conservation. More importantly, it must be about changing the financial rules that allow its disruption to continue. So four years on, we're now in the global review period, and we wanted to ask a pretty straightforward question. Have governments actually started changing the rules governing banks and investors to deliver on that target? The findings of this New Forest and Finance Coalition report are deeply troubling. We assessed financial regulations in 11 strategically important jurisdictions, both financial centers and producer regions, including the following jurisdictions. Where are we? Canada, the US, Brazil, the UK, European Union, China, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the CEMAC, Congo Basin country jurisdiction. Across these assessment criteria in each jurisdiction, we produced 33 ratings. 30 of these 33 ratings were either red or dark red. three were yellow indicating partial score and not one was green. Perhaps most strikingly, not one of the 11 jurisdictions had comprehensive financial regulations prohibiting banks and investors from financing deforestation and the conversion of natural ecosystems. Governments have agreed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, yet financial institutions providing capital to companies driving that loss are still largely free to continue doing so. It's not to say nothing has happened. There's been some developments in sustainable finance, taxonomies and disclosure requirements, but there's a fundamental distinction to be made between recognizing a problem and actually changing the financial rules to change financial behavior. A bank can disclose its exposure to deforestation, publish biodiversity policies, report on those risks, yet they can also continue financing that destruction and profiting very well from it. Much of the current regulatory debate is about protecting financial institutions from the risks of biodiversity loss to their business. But what about protecting biodiversity and the people who depend on it from the impacts of financial institutions? That's the imbalance that our report is exposing and what we're witnessing here in the CPD negotiations. And we're not talking about just a marginal part of the economy, as Meryl highlighted and UNEP has given global figures on, we're talking about very significant sums of finance globally. So this regulatory failure is also a question of rights and justice. Our assessment found that requirements for financial institutions to support a just transition almost completely absent, while protections for indigenous peoples, local communities, workers and small producers are not being systematically built into financial regulation. So just briefly before I wrap up, what needs to change? First, transparency needs to lead to accountability. Financial institutions should not only disclose where their money goes, but also its impacts and what they are doing to address them. Second, governments need binding due diligence and financing rules across lending, underwriting and investment, including restrictions where serious environmental and human rights harms are observed. Third, biodiversity needs to become part of mainstream financial regulation, including the rules used by financial supervisors, central banks and finance ministries. And fourth, these reforms must be grounded in rights with meaningful participation by affected communities and other stakeholders with clear access to remedy and consequences for noncompliance. None of this replaces the need for substantially more public finance for biodiversity, particularly the flow of finance committed by developed countries to developing countries under this framework. Those international obligations remain critical, but additional conservation finance cannot compensate for leaving these much larger harmful flows untouched. So coming to COP17 specifically and the global review, it's an opportunity to recognize that the implementation gap is not a finance gap, it is a regulatory gap. Target 14 already provides a mandate for the action, along with other targets, 15, 18, and 19, also dealing with aspects of finance. But we do need to bring finance ministries, central banks, and financial regulators into coordination with CBD negotiators to ensure the implementation of target 14. Governments cannot claim to be aligning finance with biodiversity goals while leaving the rules governing destructive finance unchanged. Thanks.

Thank you, Tom. Our next speaker is the Executive Director of TUC Indonesia, Linda Rosalina.

Hello, everyone. My name is Linda Rosalina. I represent from Transformasi untuk Keadilan Indonesia, TUK Indonesia. Today, I want to talk about the closely connection between forest fires, biodiversity loss, and financial sector. And as we know, forest fire destroy ecosystem, wildlife, and their habitats. And the impacts go beyond Indonesia. Our neighboring like Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei also suffer from the haze. And in Indonesia, forest fires happen again and again. Nusantara Atlas record around 2 million hectares of burn area up to October 2026. Even as I speak today, the fire still happening. But behind these fires, there are not only companies, there are also banks and investors financing them. So today I want to share four key points. The first one, we have identified corporate groups in the palm oil and pulp and paper sectors linked to this year's forest fires. they include fangio no Wilmar Royal Golden Eagle Sinar Mas Salim Musimas Genting Sampoerna Agro Harita Rajawali Sungai Budi Kuala Lumpur kepong Carson Cumberbatch and SD Guthrie according to took Indonesia report this group control around 7.6 million hectares of land in Indonesia. That is almost the size of Czech Republic. Several also have historical of deforestation, human rights violation, land conflict, and also corruption. Second, according to forest finance data from 2020 to September 2026, these groups receive around 50 53.4 billion US dollars in credit. Around 60% came from Indonesia banks, including Bank Central Asia, Bank Mandiri, Bank Negara Indonesia, and Bank Rakyat Indonesia. They are the four top banks in Indonesia. International banks also provide financing, including Maybank and CIMB from Malaysia, then MUFG, Mizuho and SMBC from Japan. So international banks also part of this problem. And the third, beside bank credit, this group also received around 10.7 billion US dollar in investment as of September 2026. Around 50% came from Malaysia-based investor. and another around 30% from US-based investors. This tells us something important. Indonesia provides the land. Indonesia banks provide much of the credit, but a large share of the investment comes from other countries. So the responsibility of biodiversity loss must also go beyond Indonesia. Four, Indonesia already has sustainable finance regulation, but these regulation are still not strong enough to stop financing linked to deforestation and ecosystem destruction. Under target 15 of the Global Biodiversity Framework, GBF, companies and financial institutions are required to assess and disclose the impact of their activities on biodiversity. In the context of Indonesia, however, the quality of sustainability reporting remains very, very, very low, failing to reflect the reality of environmental and social impacts of the companies being financed. Furthermore, there are no clear binding regulation that prohibit banks from financing the conversion of natural ecosystem. Additionally, under target 18 of the GBF, government must reduce harmful incentive. This includes reviewing public finance support that in practice facilitates environmental destruction. Finally, I want to emphasize one message. We cannot talk about the protecting biodiversity while we continue the financing destruction. Thank you.

Thank you, Linda. Our final speaker is the Deputy Director of the Food, Forests, and Finance Program at Friends of the Earth US, Jeff Conant.

Can you hear me? Yes. Thanks, Laurel. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm going to try to connect some big ideas here, so I hope you can follow me. We know that the primary drivers of tropical deforestation and biodiversity destruction are the industrial food commodities. Palm oil, 70% of palm oil is used in ultra-processed packaged junk food. Soy, 77% of soy is used to sustain industrial animal feedlots. And beef, which is the most inefficient and resource-intensive way to produce protein at scale. In other words, none of these commodities that are driving forest fires around the world are actually produced to address human nutrition. They are produced to create profit. In 2023, the top 20 agribusiness and food companies paid their shareholders $53.5 billion, which is more than the World Food Program needed that same year to feed 230 million of the world's most vulnerable people. When we talk about food systems, it's important to recognize that there are actually two competing food systems. On the one hand, you have the industrial food system, which produces the commodities I just named. This is a system that is linear, extractive, and profoundly polluting. Value is extracted at every step along the value chain, costs are externalized, and communities and ecosystems pay the price. On the other hand, you have the system that we can call the people's food web, the system of smallholders, indigenous producers, territorial markets, peasant farmers, fishers, and pastoralists that actually feeds most of the world. This system, at its best, is cyclical, ecological, and deeply resilient. Value is created at every step, costs are internalized, and communities and ecosystems reap the benefits. Now, just as there are two food systems, we can say that there are two economies. There's the real economy and the financialized economy. The real economy is what people experience in our daily lives through the creation and exchange of real value, producing, distributing, and consuming tangible goods and services. The financialized economy is about financial assets and speculative activities, such as trading stocks, bonds, futures, and derivatives. In practical terms, the financialized economy gives tremendous power to the banks, asset managers, stock exchanges, data providers, credit ratings agencies, and other financial powerhouses that control how money flows. And the sheer financial power of these institutions is used to increase their political power through lobbying and political spending, as I think is obvious to most of us. It's largely due to this political power that few governments, as we've learned, have meaningful regulations to prevent banks and investors from banking on biodiversity destruction and climate chaos. In a report that Friends of the Earth released last month, we mapped the 100 largest companies in the global agri-food system. And when you look at who owns these companies, you find that three investment firms own almost one quarter of the entire global industrial food system. And we know that the profits from these companies and these financial firms go straight into tax shelters in the Cayman Islands and so forth, not into social safety nets or planetary health. So we have a finance system that protects investors over people, we have a finance system that protects corporate rights over human rights and the rights of the living world, and we have a finance system that is driving biosphere destruction for short-term financial gain. Do we need regulations to close this gap and slow the destruction? Of course we do. We need antitrust laws to break up monopolies, we need position limits to prevent financial speculation, we need to shift subsidies away from harm and towards health. We need a strong UN tax cooperation convention to put hundreds of billions of dollars back into the public purse. And we need debt relief on a mass scale to allow governments to invest in what matters and not be forced to submit to the cycle of extraction. But all of these regulations and reforms depend on one very big idea, the idea that there is a social contract. that the job of governments is to protect the public good, to moderate unchecked greed and corruption, and as the UN Charter asserts, to uphold human rights. The Global Biodiversity Framework also depends on this social contract, and we have to believe that the GBF can help deliver this social contract. But in order to make this a reality, we have to disrupt and reduce the power of the financialized economy and to restore the real economies that serve our communities. Thank you.

All right, thank you, Jeff. Our speakers have kept their comments brief today, so we could maintain about 10 minutes to go to take questions from the audience. So we'd like to invite folks, if you have questions for any of the authors up here of this report, to go ahead and raise your hand. Here and then there.

So I just want to know and learn from here, like, in your opinion, How do you think that the current biodiversity finance right now is shaping the power dynamics that we have, like, in the global level or, like, in the national level, as an example? Thank you.

We're going to go ahead and take a few questions at once, and then we'll move through. And I saw a hand back here as well.

Sure.

Thank you for the focus of today's press conference, and my question's for Jeff.

Are you able to name those four investment firms? I'd be curious who they are.

Yeah, I mean, the ones I'm referring to are known as the big three, BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. And if you zoom out a little bit more, I think it's 20 investment firms own half of the global food system. But what's interesting to note there is, of course, that those three big investment firms, we call them the owners of, you know, they're universal owners, they own everything. But a lot of the money that they're managing is public money, or it's in people's retirement funds, it's in institutional investments, it's university retirement funds, it's city municipal retirement funds, so it's money that belongs to individuals on mass, but it's those three firms. And as we've learned from these reports, they have zero safeguards for biodiversity, human rights, and so forth. Yeah.

Thanks, Jeff. Did we have any, we have one more in the back here.

Hello, I'm Fatima from Business Indonesia. My question is, other than regular regulatory reform what would in in our side in people we keep our money in that institution right what what what this research have found regarding this uh is there any steps we could push to the this institution um and would it be like effective to to do so thank you.

Your understand that yeah okay maybe one more and then we can move into answering. Does anyone else have? Okay, well, I will leave it to y'all to decide.

Thanks for the questions. I think what we've seen is a number of decades of voluntary business ways and initiatives to address these sorts of issues. Going back to the establishment of certification schemes and the role of financial institutions in those, RSPO and FSC, for example, through to bank commitments on various policy standards, usually in response to very negative, very public publicity about particular scandals. We've also seen the development of international initiatives like the Task Force for Nature-Related Financial Disclosures and other similar sorts of initiatives. From my experience and my analysis, I would draw some of the following conclusions. These sorts of initiatives and policies are established by the institutions causing the harm and by associations that have a not just a vested interest, but often a fiduciary interest and requirement to continue maximising profit. So that's not a good basis for ensuring good business conduct. We've seen time and again where there have been improvements in business policies and standards, and of course we welcome that, and in fact often have been involved in pushing for those sorts of changes. But over a long period of time, what we haven't seen is much change to portfolios. We haven't seen the standard large conglomerates and producers who are causing these harms on the ground to be dropped from financial business relationships. So we've seen voluntary approaches fail. And what we need to see now is government step up and, as Jeff put it, fulfill their side of the social contract in protecting people and ecosystems. Thanks.

Maybe I'll jump in. to say, to echo Tom's point, some of you may remember that in UNFCCC COP26, one of the agreements that came out of that moment was called the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, and GFANZ for short. And that was a lot of the world's largest financial institutions coming together to commit to financing, bringing emissions down to net zero. And it was a lot of us at that time were, I'd say, cautiously optimistic that we had the voluntary will of some of the world's largest financiers to address the climate crisis. Fast forward a handful of years, Donald Trump wins the presidency in the US. And all of the work that was done to establish a basis for environmental, social, and governance rules in the US were essentially rolled back, both in terms of federal policy, but also in terms of the will of these financial institutions. I think BlackRock, who I just named, the world's largest asset manager, was the first asset manager to back out of their net zero commitment. And they will no longer, you know, make any public statements regarding, you know, climate, human rights, biodiversity, and so forth. So that, to my mind, is, you know, is kind of the premier example of the fact that, you know, it is important to hold financiers' feet to the fire and to make them accountable. But voluntary initiatives like this shift with the political winds and That's where we need people's movements to not only hold the financiers accountable, but to hold our governments accountable and to build our own real alternative economies, I believe.

I want to answer the question from Business Indonesia. I think there are three things we can do. First, we need to expose where the money goes. Like today, we launched the report, "Banking on Biodiversity Collapse and Financial Regulation Gaps," because through research and investigation, we, civil society, can show banks and investors are connected with the deforestation, human rights violation, corruption, and also fresh fires. And the second, we need to put pressure to financial institutions. In Indonesia, we took Indonesia has taken legal action to Bank Mandiri, one of the biggest banks in Indonesia, over its financing of palm oil company linked to environmental and land rights problems. And the last, the third, we need stronger government regulation. Yeah, we cannot rely only on voluntary commitments from investor. And I think there is another important point. Thanks.

Thank you, Linda. And with that, we have reached our time, but I know that our speakers would be happy to follow up if there's any additional questions just outside the room. So thanks to each of y'all. Appreciate it. And also just a reminder that we do have physical copies of the executive summary of the report available as well. Thanks.