A national picture of what a government spends on nature is assembled in three passes, and the order matters because each depends on the one before it.
The first pass counts. Somebody has to establish what the state already spends, which is harder than it sounds, because almost none of that money sits under a budget heading with the word biodiversity on it. It is scattered through a forestry agency, a water utility, an agricultural subsidy, a university grant and a national park turnstile. Counting it means fixing a rule for how much of each line belongs in the total, then applying that rule to the same published accounts year after year, so the series can at least be compared with itself.
The second pass prices. A needs assessment takes what the country has already promised, usually in a national biodiversity strategy with a date on it, costs delivering it, and subtracts what is being spent now. What is left is the shortfall, and the shortfall is the figure that gets quoted.
The third pass proposes. A finance plan names the instruments meant to close that shortfall: tax transfers to local government, park revenue, endowments, redirected subsidies, borrowing pledged against a conservation commitment. How far any of them has got, and whether anyone has costed it, varies enormously and is the part most often left vague.
Each dossier reads one country's own documents in that order and names every one of them. Dossiers exist for four countries so far.
The four dossiers
- Brazil A climate fund whose fundraising ceiling is a subtraction, a tax transfer to municipalities, and a park agency living off gate receipts and fines.
- Mexico A country that folded its biodiversity spending estimate into the national accounts, and what those accounts then showed.
- Costa Rica A fuel tax, a water tariff and thirty years of contracts with landowners, read from the fund that signs them.
- South Africa Park revenue, a biodiversity economy strategy, and nine provincial budgets to read alongside the national one.