Financial support is crucial for advancing biodiversity conservation, which is a critical part of global efforts to achieve sustainable development goals including climate change mitigation, disaster risk reduction, and water and food security, according to experts.

"Biodiversity financing determines the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation," said Zhu Li, director of the Conservation Program at the Paulson Institute, during a recent interview about the upcoming Paulson Prize for sustainablity on Thursday in Beijing.

Zhu stressed that resource mobilization is one of the main tasks in protecting biological diversity and that governments are the main source of funding for biodiversity protection. China's contributions now account for about 57% of total funding, playing a pivotal role in this field, according to statistics.

China also plays an active role in domestic biodiversity protection, with government funds accounting for more than 90% of the total investment in preventing biodiversity loss. A report on China's biodiversity financing, released by the Foreign Environmental Cooperation Center in partnership with the Paulson Institute, revealed that from 2011 to 2020, China's core financial investment in biodiversity protection totaled approximately 2.16 trillion yuan ($298.33 billion), accounting for approximately 0.24-0.29% of GDP. This level of investment is comparable to that of Canada, France, Spain, and the U.K., which invested approximately 0.3% of their GDP in biodiversity protection from 2008 to 2017.

Despite China's significant investment in biodiversity protection, experts say that global funding for biodiversity conservation still falls short. "The current annual gap between expenditure and demand for biodiversity is about $700 billion," said Jerry Yu, chief representative of the China office and managing director of the Paulson Institute. He called for private sector participation to promote continuous innovation and change in this field and urged tightened international cooperation to boost biodiversity protection.

In recent years, various market-based biodiversity financing mechanisms have emerged, such as payments for ecosystem services, green bonds, biodiversity impact offsets, and even the emerging biodiversity credit market. "In the long run, only by developing and promoting diversified biodiversity financing mechanisms can we effectively fill the funding gap we face in biodiversity conservation," noted Zhu Li, director of the Conservation Program at the Paulson Institute.

Dr. Zhu Da, China country director of The Nature Conservancy, echoed Zhu Li's opinion, stressing that biodiversity protection is a group effort encompassing all sectors of society, including institutions, enterprises, and governments. 

He emphasized that each party has its own responsibilities in biodiversity conservation. Governments should shoulder more managing responsibilities, the public should participate in protection efforts, and scientific research institutions should focus on cutting-edge scientific research, he added.