Design of a Biodiversity Financial Instrument System Based on China’s National Conditions

This study aims to address long-standing predicaments in conventional ecological protection initiatives, including sub-optimal investment and financing efficiency, challenges in performance oversight and compliance supervision, and inadequate incentive and disincentive mechanisms. It seeks to design a biodiversity financial instrument system grounded in Contract Theory and Incentive-Compatibility Theory. The core innovation lies in the development of a flexible financing cost mechanism that dynamically links debt servicing costs to quantifiable biodiversity conservation performance. Specifically, first, it will establish a diversified financial instrument matrix covering core tools such as green credit, ecological credit pre-purchase financing, and financing for the development of Mitigation Banks. Among them, green credit business explicitly links key elements such as corporate financing interest rates and credit lines directly to the specific content, duration of corporate ecological protection performance commitments and actual ecological performance; ecological credit pre-purchase financing introduces an advance payment mechanism, where demanders pre-purchase the credit value corresponding to potential ecological protection achievements to provide initial start-up funds for ecological protection projects; financing for the development of Mitigation Banks focuses on providing special fund support for the creation, restoration and long-term protection projects of key ecosystem, and the core output of such investments is tradable “mitigation credits”, which provide a compensation channel for the ecological impacts of development projects. Second, it will establish a conversion channel between ecological value and financial prices. By constructing a quantitative evaluation model covering dimensions such as biodiversity richness, ecosystem service value, and ecological risk prevention and control effects, the abstract concept of “ecological protection” is converted into specific and measurable price signals in financial contracts, enabling capital to clearly identify the value returns of ecological protection projects. Third, it will strengthen the capital guidance effect. Through the coordinated operation of the above-mentioned financial instruments and the accurate transmission of price signals, it will break the inertial orientation of traditional capital that “values development over protection”, and accurately guide social capital from the high-energy-consumption and high-pollution “nature-destroying” field to the “nature-investing” field of ecological restoration and biodiversity protection.