State of Finance for Forests 2025: Unlock. Unleash. Realizing Forest Potential requires Tripling Investments in Forests by 2030

The first edition of the State of Finance for Forests (SFF) report provides an overview of global public and private financial flows to forests in 2023, comparing these finance flows to the investment needed to unlock forests’ potential to address climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation. What sets the SFF report apart from other assessments is its effort to track 2023 forest finance flows by incorporating key private finance channels and nature related asset classes1. These include certified commodity supply chains, impact investing, carbon markets, biodiversity credits and offsets, private philanthropic contributions to forests and private investments mobilized by public finance. While data availability remains a significant challenge, the report adopts a pragmatic approach, working with available data and maintaining transparency about methodological limitations and assumptions. The main finding of SFF is that forests are significantly underfunded. To achieve the Rio Convention targets related to climate change, biodiversity and land degradation2, annual forest investments need to more than triple from US$ 84 billion in 2023 to US$ 300 billion per year by 2030 and reach US$ 498 billion per year by 2050. The forest finance gap that needs to be closed with both public and private sources of capital between now and 2030 is therefore US$ 216 billion per year.