Charge towards green finance ignores risks of nature commodification: Evidence from the UK 's climate and nature recovery policy landscape

Abstract The urgent need for up‐scaled finance has become central to the climate and nature recovery discourses worldwide. With most existing investments coming from public sources, closing the financing gap has become the overpowering argument for calling for private investments into nature restoration and conservation. This paper aims to evidence empirically the alarmingly little attention that is being paid, in the policy sphere, to the risks of nature commodification in this newly super‐charged advocacy for green finance in nature recovery. We conduct a document analysis of policy and advisory documents regarding the UK's green finance strategy to establish whether and to what extent the risks of nature commodification feature at all. We found that the strategy overwhelmingly frames risks in terms of how they affect investors or the market, but not our relationship with nature. Overall, there seems to be an implicit narrative in favour of commodification. Critically, the risks are not unknown, but the framing remains decidedly commercial. Put against the backdrop of the global social and ecological devastations caused by long‐standing forms of nature commodification and the fact that carbon and nature markets seem not to be achieving much (both in terms of actual positive environmental impact and in attracting financing), it seems pertinent to ask: are we risking too much for too little? We argue that we need to dedicate at least as much effort—if not more—to imagining alternatives, for example, based on re‐igniting kinship with nature than to keep trying to shoehorn green finance where it simply might not belong. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog. Spanish translation: Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.