Ecuador bets on green finance while opening new Amazon oil blocks

Ecuador plans its first sovereign green bond in 2027 and new biodiversity credits, while opening Amazon oil blocks for bidding — a balancing act drawing protests from Indigenous groups.

Green money for a megadiverse country

Ecuador, one of 17 megadiverse countries and home to the Galapagos Islands, the Amazon rainforest, the Andes and the Pacific coast, wants to turn its nature into finance. The government is pursuing green bonds, debt-for-nature swaps and biodiversity credits to channel money into conservation, and it hopes to issue its first sovereign green bond in 2027.

The country 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 debt-for-nature swaps in 2023 and 2024, deals that refinance debt on better terms in exchange for conservation spending. Together, they freed up about $1.1 billion for the Amazon and the Galapagos Islands. A second swap, completed in December 2024, refinanced $1.5 billion of debt and unlocked $460 million for Amazon conservation, Reuters reported.

The other side of the balance

The same government also plans to keep drilling. In October, it announced plans to open new tenders for oil exploration in parts of the Amazon, according to local media reports, drawing criticism from Indigenous leaders who strongly oppose the plans. Ecuador is a significant oil producer in Central and South America, and about 80% of its energy was generated from oil and oil products in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency, while about two-thirds of its electricity came from hydroelectric power.

Environment and Energy Minister Juan Carlos Blum described the tension directly: 'We are being careful on that balance between biodiversity and natural resources use, renewables or not renewables, and it's a delicate matter.' He said cracking down on illegal mining is a focus, and that illegal mining is a far bigger problem than legal mining. Ecuador will host the U.N. biodiversity summit, COP18, in 2028, and Blum said the government is looking to the European Union for advice on green bond instruments. The bloc set green bond standards in 2024.

Biodiversity credits and the road to 2028

At Ecuador's first Bio Summit, held November 4 to November 6 in Quito, a new way of monetizing nature was introduced. Marcelo Salame, the event's president, is working on a project to bring 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.

Biodiversity credits work in a similar way to carbon credits, but they track a range of measures such as the number of species in an area or tree canopy cover, and the money raised goes back into nature protection. Unlike carbon credits, they cannot be used to offset emissions. 'It's all about funding verified nature outcomes and not, to date at least, compensating for damage,' said Martin Vaquié, co-founder of Berlin-based Bloomlabs, a company that tracks the biodiversity market. In 2023, Ecuador issued a blue bond that provides $12 million a year for conservation on the Galapagos Islands.

Sources

• CNBC, 2026-11-14
• Reuters, 2024-12-17