The nature that green finance can see: nature-related risk and the climatization of biodiversity

This article examines why and how biodiversity enters finance through its alignment with the climate risk agenda, a process I conceptualize as the climatization of biodiversity. I argue that this development is rooted in the historical failure to financialize biodiversity due to its misalignment with the logics of finance, namely profitability and calculability, to which climate is more readily compatible. Drawing on expert interviews and analysis of policy and methodological reports, the article focuses on two key institutional sites: the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and the Network for Greening the Financial System (NGFS). It identifies two pathways through which climatization unfolds. First, a strategic pathway, exemplified by the TNFD, involves a process of translation whereby biodiversity actors replicate climate-risk templates to render biodiversity attractive to private finance. Second, a path-dependent pathway, illustrated by the NGFS, reflects a process of extension through which central banks build on existing climate-based analytical tools to incorporate biodiversity. In both cases, biodiversity is reframed as ‘nature’ in an effort to align more closely with the logics of finance. In this sense, climatization functions as an emerging, though still unproven, route toward the financialization of biodiversity.