The first International Civil Society Forum on Nature Finance took place on 18–19 March 2026 at Riddel Hall, Queen’s University Belfast, and concluded with great success. During this two Open Day event, participants took part in a series of co-creation workshops exploring key challenges and opportunities for financing nature restoration. The event brought together approximately 100 participants from business, government, academia and civil society. Across 13 workshops, participants exchanged experiences, discussed practical challenges and explored potential pathways for strengthening nature finance. For BIOFIN-EU, the workshops provided a valuable opportunity to engage directly with a diverse range of stakeholders and gather insights that can help connect the project’s work with real-world needs and experiences.
Day 1: Understanding the challenges
The first day focused on the social, institutional and financial barriers that can prevent greater investment in nature. Discussions covered community rights and environmental justice, policy and regulatory frameworks, conservation funding, lessons from the River Wye, Lough Neagh, and Brazil, the role of nature as a public good or private asset, civil society participation, and the alignment of incentives.
Across these discussions, participants highlighted recurring challenges such as fragmented policies, short-term funding, limited community participation, lack of trust, weak incentives and difficulties in translating evidence into effective action.
For BIOFIN-EU, these discussions provided valuable stakeholder perspectives on the wider conditions needed to unlock finance for nature. They also helped the project better understand the practical barriers faced by communities, organisations and investors, providing useful insights for its work on developing approaches that can support greater investment in biodiversity and nature restoration.
Day 2: Exploring solutions and opportunities
The second day shifted towards potential solutions and emerging approaches. Workshops explored topics including natural capital legislation, embedding nature in society, emerging natural capital markets, biodiversity valuation, recognising nature as critical national infrastructure, and the application of Biodiversity Net Gain in different countries.
Participants considered how policy, education, data, valuation approaches, markets and regulatory frameworks could work together to strengthen the role of nature in decision-making and investment.
For BIOFIN-EU, the second day offered an opportunity to explore how different stakeholders view emerging approaches to nature finance and what is needed to make them effective in practice. The discussions provided useful feedback on policy levers, financial mechanisms, knowledge needs and stakeholder engagement, helping to inform the project’s efforts to identify practical pathways towards increased investment in nature.
From dialogue to action
Across both days, the workshops reinforced that unlocking finance for nature requires more than mobilising capital. Strong policy frameworks, appropriate incentives, reliable knowledge and data, meaningful stakeholder participation and effective governance are all important parts of creating the conditions for investment.
The co-creation workshops therefore offered BIOFIN-EU a valuable space to listen, exchange and test ideas with stakeholders from different sectors. The insights gathered will contribute to the project’s broader efforts to identify practical ways of connecting finance with biodiversity protection and restoration.
