France allocated 14,172 million euros of green sovereign bond proceeds in 2024. Its own report splits that across four national environmental objectives, and the share attributed to protecting biodiversity is 1,116 million euros, or eight per cent. The largest single contribution to that figure, 589.9 million euros, does not come from the sector the report calls living resources. It comes from the multi-sector line, which the report says is essentially research funding. That is what nature looks like inside a long-running sovereign green bond programme: a real number, published every year and audited, and mostly spent on knowing things.
A green bond is an ordinary debt instrument carrying an extra promise about what the money will be used for and what the issuer will disclose afterwards. It ranks with the issuer's other debt, it is repaid from the issuer's general resources, and the projects it names do not secure it. Everything that makes it green sits in the documentation.
What the Principles actually require
The reference text is the Green Bond Principles, published by the International Capital Market Association and updated in June 2025. The Principles describe themselves as voluntary process guidelines, and they are guidelines about disclosure rather than about outcomes. Four core components define alignment: use of proceeds, a process for project evaluation and selection, management of proceeds, and reporting. Two further recommendations exist for issuers wanting more transparency, namely a published framework and an external review. An issuer that follows all six has told the market a great deal about its intentions and has committed to nothing about the ecological result.
Use of proceeds is the component that matters for nature, because it is where the eligible categories live. The Principles recognise several broad environmental objectives, among them natural resource conservation and biodiversity conservation, and then set out an indicative list of project categories. Two of them are relevant here. One is environmentally sustainable management of living natural resources and land use, which the text expands to include environmentally sustainable agriculture, animal husbandry, fishery and aquaculture, and forestry including afforestation, reforestation and the preservation or restoration of natural landscapes. The other is terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity conservation, expanded to include the protection of coastal, marine and watershed environments. The 2025 edition changed the definition of a green project to cover activities alongside assets, investments and related expenditure, and added a reference to the separate guidance on green enabling projects.
Because the list is indicative and the framework is written by the issuer, the practical question is never whether a green bond can fund nature. It plainly can. The question is what proportion of a given issuer's eligible expenditure sits in those two categories, and whether the allocation report says so afterwards in figures a reader can check.
France publishes the biodiversity share every year
Agence France Tresor launched its first sovereign green bond, the 1.75 per cent June 2039 OAT, on 24 January 2017, and reports on the programme in detail. Its report on 2024 covers four bonds. One new line was launched, the 3.00 per cent June 2049, whose inaugural syndication raised 8,000 million euros against total demand of more than 98,000 million; three existing lines were reissued. Total green issuance for the year was 14,172 million euros, and the combined outstanding stock at 31 December 2024 was 76,000 million euros: 35.1 billion in the 2039 line, 23.9 billion in the 2044 line, 7.1 billion in the inflation-indexed 2038 line and 9.9 billion in the new 2049 line.
The reporting discipline is what makes the programme useful to read. Expenditure must have been incurred in the year of issuance or the year before it, so the refinancing window is one year and no more. The amounts allocated are audited externally each year. The framework document provides for an annual update of the second party opinion, and reports on the environmental effects of eligible expenditure are carried out by an independent body created for that purpose, the Evaluation Council. The 2024 report is the last one written under the framework document published in 2017, before the revised framework takes over.
Nature enters through two doors. The report divides expenditure by sector, and one of the seven sectors is living resources, described as covering the natural resources of mainland France and its overseas territories and the measures intended to halt species loss and restore habitats. That sector received 987.2 million euros of the 2024 allocation. Separately, every sector's spending is split across the four national objectives, and the biodiversity objective totals 1,116 million euros. The two numbers are not the same thing and neither is a subset of the other. Within living resources, 426.7 million euros is attributed to biodiversity and 426.7 million to adaptation, with the rest split between mitigation and pollution. Within multi-sector research spending of 3,731.6 million euros, 589.9 million is attributed to biodiversity. Then the building sector at 52.6 million, pollution and eco-efficiency at 29.1 million, adaptation at 13.3 million, transport at 4.8 million, and energy at nothing at all. Those seven lines are the 1,116.
Read that distribution honestly and it says something a headline cannot. The single biggest biodiversity line in the French programme is research, and the sector explicitly dedicated to living resources is the second. Neither is a park, a reserve or a restoration contract. This is a sovereign budget being labelled after the fact by objective, not a fund built to buy habitat, and the report is candid enough about its own method that the difference is visible on the page.
The candour extends to a decision the report explains rather than buries. A European regulation creating the European green bond designation has applied since the end of 2024, resting largely on the European taxonomy and requiring alignment with its criteria, transparency before issuance and external verification. Agence France Tresor decided not to use it. Its stated reasons are that taxonomy alignment does not apply to sovereign issuers, and that the label is hard to reconcile with the way a state budget works and with the annual after-the-fact allocation the French framework runs on. It says it will keep watching the standard and has committed to reporting each year on how far its eligible expenditure lines up with taxonomy criteria anyway. So a regulated European label and a voluntary set of Principles now sit side by side, and an issuer that has been publishing allocation reports since 2017 has stayed with the voluntary one, on the ground that the regulated one was not written for governments.
The same pair of documents governs corporate issuance, with one difference that matters. A company can fall inside the taxonomy's scope, so the regulated designation is genuinely available to it in a way it is not to a finance ministry. The question to ask of any corporate green bond is therefore which of the two regimes the issuer chose, and then the same question as for a sovereign: what the allocation report says afterwards, and whether anyone external checked it.
Chile names nature in its framework and does not report funding it
Chile has issued green, social and sustainable bonds since 2019, and by the end of 2024 those instruments amounted to about 43,500 million dollars, of which roughly 7,584 million dollars were green. Its framework defines six eligible green sectors, and the fourth is natural resources, land use and protected marine areas. The verifier's summary of the eligible expenditure spells out what that sector was meant to fund: forestry programmes for the conservation and restoration of native and exotic forests, the management and maintenance of national parks and conservation areas, and the protection and monitoring of marine protected areas including research.
Table 4 of the 2024 report sets out the green portfolio project by project and year by year, and metro construction dominates it. The projects listed sit under clean transport, renewable energy, green buildings and the conservation of water resources. The accompanying chart of expenditure by green sector shows four bars: clean transportation, renewable energy, green buildings and water management. The natural resources sector that the framework lists fourth is not among them.
This is the gap between eligibility and allocation, and it is the single most useful thing to check about any green bond. A framework that lists biodiversity conservation costs the issuer nothing. An allocation report that names the sector, gives it a number and has that number audited is a different kind of statement. France does the second. On the evidence of its own 2024 report, Chile has so far done the first.
When an instrument is really about nature, it usually stops being a green bond
The structures built specifically for biodiversity keep leaving the use of proceeds format behind, and the reason is that use of proceeds cannot pay for a result. Chile's own next step makes the point. Rather than route conservation through its green bond, the finance ministry added a biodiversity indicator to its sustainability-linked bond framework, developed with the environment ministry. The indicator has two components: the share of terrestrial ecosystems, including inland waters, under protected areas or other effective area-based conservation measures, targeting at least 30 per cent of national land by 2030 against a current 21.6 per cent, and the share of protected terrestrial ecosystems meeting every key effectiveness metric for governance, planning, personnel and monitoring, targeting at least 10 per cent of national land. The framework allows the coupon to step down if both targets are met, as well as up if they are missed. The finance ministry's announcement reports that Sustainalytics issued a second party opinion rating the indicator very strong and its targets highly ambitious. Nothing in that structure restricts what the proceeds buy. The money is fungible and the coupon is the lever.
The World Bank went further in the other direction. Its Wildlife Conservation Bond, priced in March 2022, is a five-year 150 million dollar sustainable development bond that pays investors no coupon at all. Instead the issuer makes conservation investment payments totalling 152 million rand to the managers of Addo Elephant National Park and the Great Fish River Nature Reserve in South Africa, and at maturity investors receive principal plus a conservation success payment calculated from the black rhino population growth rate across the two sites, independently calculated by Conservation Alpha and verified by the Zoological Society of London, and funded by a performance-based grant from the Global Environment Facility. The maximum success payment is 13.76 million dollars. The World Bank describes the design as passing project risk to capital market investors and allowing donors to pay for outcomes.
Ranked by how tightly the money is bound to the nature outcome, that is the order. A green bond binds proceeds to a category and reports on them. A sustainability-linked bond binds a coupon to a national statistic and lets the proceeds go anywhere. An outcome bond binds the investor's return to a counted population of animals. And a debt conversion binds the savings from a refinancing to a spending commitment that outlives the transaction. The green bond binds the money most loosely of the four, which is exactly why the allocation report, and not the framework, is the document worth reading before believing anything about where the proceeds went.
Sources
Every figure, date and deal name above is drawn from one of the documents below. Each was fetched and cached on the retrieval date shown.
- International Capital Market Association, Green Bond Principles: Voluntary Process Guidelines for Issuing Green Bonds, June 2025 edition. The four core components, the two key recommendations, and the eligible project categories including environmentally sustainable management of living natural resources and land use, and terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity conservation https://www.icmagroup.org/assets/documents/Sustainable-finance/2025-updates/Green-Bond-Principles-GBP-June-2025.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- International Capital Market Association, Green Bond Principles page. Confirms June 2025 as the current edition and records what the 2025 update changed, including the addition of activities to the definition of a Green Project https://www.icmagroup.org/sustainable-finance/the-principles-guidelines-and-handbooks/green-bond-principles-gbp/ Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Agence France Tresor, Green OAT 2024 Allocation and Performance Report, English edition. Total issuance and outstanding stock, the one year refinancing window, the external audit and Evaluation Council arrangements, the seven sector allocations and the split of each across the four national environmental objectives https://www.aft.gouv.fr/files/medias-aft/3_Dette/3.2_OATMLT/3.2.2_OATVerte/RAPPORT_AFT_OAT%20VERTE_2024_FINAL_WEB_ANG.pdf Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Ministerio de Hacienda de Chile, 2024 Report on Allocation, Eligibility and Environmental Impact of Green, Social and Sustainable Bonds. The six eligible green sectors, the verifier summary of eligible green expenditure, the summary table of green project allocation to end-2024 and the chart of expenditure by green sector. The report page redirects to a signed content delivery link that expires https://www.hacienda.cl/english/work-areas/international-finance/public-debt-office/sustainable-bonds/reports/2024-report-allocation-eligibility-environmental-impact-green-social-and Retrieved 2026-08-30
- Ministerio de Hacienda de Chile, Ministry of Finance updates its Sustainability-Linked Bond Framework, incorporating a new KPI related to biodiversity. The two components of the indicator, the 30 per cent and 10 per cent targets for 2030, the current 21.6 per cent coverage, the step-down and step-up coupon, and the ministry account of the second party opinion https://www.hacienda.cl/english/news-and-events/news/ministry-of-finance-updates-its-sustainability-linked-bond-framework Retrieved 2026-08-30
- World Bank, Wildlife Conservation Bond Boosts South Africa Efforts to Protect Black Rhinos and Support Local Communities. Press release, 23 March 2022, with the size and tenor, the absence of a coupon, the conservation investment payments, the maximum conservation success payment and the verification arrangements https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/03/23/wildlife-conservation-bond-boosts-south-africa-s-efforts-to-protect-black-rhinos-and-support-local-communities Retrieved 2026-08-30