Ecuador wants to monetize its biodiversity — while still drilling for oil

A pair of hoazin seen in Ecuador's Yasuni National Park in the Amazon Basin. Ecuador is one of 17 'megadiverse' countries.

Jon G. Fuller | Universal Images Group | Getty Images

Ecuador, known for its "megadiverse" Galapagos Islands, Amazon rainforest, Andes and Pacific coast, wants to protect its natural landscapes for years to come — but it faces a tricky balancing act. 

As well as preserving its nature, the South American country also plans to capitalize on its critical minerals and continue to extract oil from parts of the Amazon — both of which have led to protests from Indigenous and environmental groups.

One way Ecuador is planning to channel funds into its nature is via new financial tools, such as "debt-for-nature" swaps and its first sovereign green bond. It is also aiming to raise its environmental profile on the global stage by hosting the U.N.'s biodiversity summit, known as COP18, in 2028.

Ecuador, which uses the U.S. dollar, is no stranger to green finance. In March, IDB Invest, the private-sector arm of the Inter-American Development Bank, and Ecuadorian lender Banco Bolivariano issued a $120 million biodiversity bond to back conservation projects. The government also completed two swaps in 2023 and 2024 — deals in which a country's debt is refinanced on better terms in exchange for commitments to spend the savings on conservation. Together, they freed up about $1.1 billion for conservation in the Amazon and Galapagos Islands.

We are being careful on that balance between biodiversity and natural resources use, renewables or not renewables, and it's a delicate matter

Juan Carlos Blum

Minister of Environment and Energy, Ecuador

Juan Carlos Blum, Ecuador's minister of environment and energy, said the country hopes to issue sovereign green bonds for the first time in 2027, to raise finance to protect its coastal and mountainous regions and the people whose livelihoods depend on them. The government is looking to the European Union for advice on such instruments, he said. The bloc set green bond standards in 2024.

For Blum, one of the challenges is public awareness. "A lot of us are not aware of how we depend on nature, how we depend on the biodiversity, how vulnerable we all are towards climate," he told CNBC by video call.

Oil and mining

The Amazon-indigenous Waorani shout slogans during a protest against the oil tenders opened by the Ecuadorian Government on May 13, 2025 in Quito, Ecuador.

Franklin Jacome | Agencia Press South | Getty Images

"We are being careful on that balance between biodiversity and natural resources use, renewables or not renewables, and it's a delicate matter," Blum said. "That's my day-to-day reality, dealing with balancing this."

About 80% of Ecuador's energy was generated from oil and oil products in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, while about two-thirds of its electricity was produced using hydroelectric power.

Cracking down on illegal mining is a focus for Blum, who told CNBC he was aware of the environmental impact of legal mining, but that illegal mining was a far bigger problem.

Biodiversity credits

At Ecuador's first Bio Summit held Nov. 4 to Nov. 6 in Quito — an event aimed at helping the country's natural assets "enter the global financial system" — a new way of monetizing nature was introduced.

Marcelo Salame, the event's president, told CNBC he is working on a project to bring so-called biodiversity credits to the country for the first time, to "preserve and monetize" a 260-hectare, or 640-acre, area of the Prosperina forest owned by ESPOL University in the port city of Guayaquil.

That can be potentially dangerous because then you have people that are optimizing for this one metric at the expense of all the other things

Jerry Toth

Third Millennium Alliance

Salame said biodiversity is "multidimensional," with credits reflecting a whole ecosystem rather than carbon emissions alone.

Biodiversity credits work in a similar way to the carbon credits that large companies buy to meet sustainability goals, but track a range of measures such as the number of species in a given area or tree canopy cover, with the money raised funneled back into nature protection.

But whereas carbon credits can be used to offset emissions, biodiversity credits cannot. "It's all about funding verified nature outcomes and not, to date at least, compensating for damage," Martin Vaquié, co-founder of Berlin-based Bloomlabs, a company that tracks the biodiversity market, told CNBC.

A Galapagos giant tortoise walks through a reserve on Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos Islands. In 2023, Ecuador issued a "blue bond" that will provide $12 million a year for conservation on the islands.

Johis Alarcon| Bloomberg | Getty Images

Jerry Toth, a conservationist and co-founder of Ecuador-based Third Millennium Alliance, a nonprofit that aims to protect the "last remnants" of Ecuador's Pacific Forest, told CNBC that carbon markets can reduce the ecological value of a forest to a single metric: how many tons of carbon it stores.

"That can be potentially dangerous because then you have people that are optimizing for this one metric at the expense of all the other things," he said. Toth hopes biodiversity credits can capture the nuances of an ecosystem.

Regenerative cacao

Toth also runs chocolate maker To'ak — which made headlines for producing the "world's most expensive chocolate bar" — using ancient Nacional cacao grown in Ecuador's Manabí province and processed in Quito.

A box of To'ak chocolates made from Ecuador's heirloom Nacional cacao can cost as much as $500.

To'ak Chocolate

Third Millennium Alliance works with farmers to restore degraded land by planting cacao in the shade of taller trees, and To'ak pays them around $1.20 per pound of cacao, about double the current market price, Toth said.

Ensuring that chocolate production does not deplete nature is "the key question," Toth said. "Our goal at the outset was, how do we use chocolate to reverse deforestation?"

Ecuador recognizes its "immense" ecological and biological resources, Toth said. "It's still trying to figure out how to … capture that value in a way that makes sense both for people in Ecuador and for the ecosystem."