Development Banks Put Biodiversity Gains into Project Due Diligence at COP17

Thursday 29th October 2026

By inAfrika Newsroom

Development banks have published a joint approach to identifying biodiversity benefits during project preparation, with implications for how African infrastructure and energy investments are designed. The African Development Bank reported the initiative on 28 October 2026 following its launch at the UN biodiversity conference, CBD COP17, in Yerevan.

The briefing, Identifying Opportunities to Support Biodiversity Objectives Through MDB Operations, looks beyond avoiding environmental damage to opportunities for conservation, restoration and enhancement. It proposes using existing environmental and social due-diligence processes to identify those opportunities while keeping their risk-management role intact.

Its pathways include selecting suitable projects early, examining biodiversity opportunities during appraisal and considering effects across wider landscapes or systems. The document presents an approach to project design and assessment, rather than announcing a new financing fund.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development says it is piloting the approach in projects including the ELMED electricity connection between Tunisia and Italy. It also identifies pilots in Romania and Moldova, showing that the work spans different types of investment.

The practical issue is evidence. A project cannot establish a biodiversity gain simply by describing an activity as green, planting trees or committing money; it needs a baseline, a defined objective and a method for checking change over time.

The briefing points to established measurement approaches, including habitat quality-hectares. Such measures consider ecological condition as well as area, making the quality of the underlying assessment important to any claim of improvement.

African project developers and lenders will therefore need to connect the proposed benefits with budgets, implementation responsibilities and monitoring. The next question is whether individual projects disclose measurable results, extending the investment-readiness discussion in InAfrika’s coverage of African nature enterprises into the design of larger infrastructure.