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A free seven-week course, offered in English, Spanish, French and Russian

The world’s natural capital – the ecosystems and biodiversity that sustain us all – is estimated to be worth US$125 trillion per year, a figure that exceeds global GDP. The food we eat, the air we breathe, our water, our medicines, our safety – all depend on nature. Humanity depends on nature. Yet we have historically ignored nature’s social and economic values. Globally we spend less than .0067% of global GDP on securing nature, and every dollar invested in nature returns on average more than 20 times the value to society.

As a result, biodiversity and ecosystems all around the world are threatened. In the last 20 years, we lost an area of wilderness half the size of the Amazon. We have lost 60% of populations of more than 15,000 species in the last 50 years. We lost an area of forests the size of Germany in just 3 years. Nature is under assault, and is at risk of ecosystem collapses around the world. These losses profoundly compromise not only our ability to achieve the SDGs, but also undermine our very future. These losses are driven not only by underfunding, but also by conflicting private and public interests, and ineffective policy, governance and capacity. It’s time to make a business case for economically sound and politically feasible solutions for financing biodiversity.

We at UNDP are running a Massive Online Open Course on Biodiversity Finance, a free seven-week course, offered in English, Spanish, French and Russian, with a number of our partners. Based on the UNDP-led BIOFIN project (www.biodiversityfinance.org) that operates in 30 countries around the world, this course will teach participants how to assess the policy, institutional, and economic context for biodiversity finance; conduct a financial needs assessment to achieve a country’s biodiversity goals; and develop a biodiversity finance plan that includes the most viable finance solutions in a national context.

The course runs from 15 April through 31 May 2019 and is designed to train biodiversity policymakers and practitioners to use the language of business and finance to improve biodiversity finance.

Registration links: English, French, Spanish, Russian. Participants who do not have a Learning for Nature account must create an account here prior to registering for the course.

Click here for the Course trailer
Click here for the Registration announcement
Click here for the Promotional package