THE Global Biodiversity Summit has arrived with a hard-won credential: Guyana’s rainforests generate US15.2 billion in annual ecosystem services without a single tree felled.

Rich with 8,000 plant species, 1,200 birds, and 225 mammals, this tiny republic now argues—convincingly—that conservation can out-earn extraction.

President Irfaan Ali’s message is refreshingly blunt: biodiversity is infrastructure and must be financed as rigorously as roads or ports.

The numbers back him. Guyana still shelters 85 per cent of its territory under intact canopy, locking away 19.5 gigatonnes of carbon and absorbing 153 million tonnes every year.

Its forest carbon credits, sold to Hess for US$750 million, already funnel revenues to Indigenous communities while proving that “standing trees” can pay the bills.

The Global Biodiversity Alliance promises to scale that experiment, trading new biodiversity credits, green bonds, and debt-for-nature swaps so that rare orchids and river otters become revenue lines, not collateral damage.

Yet admiration alone will not secure the Amazonian fringe. The world loses 10 million hectares of forest annually, and only 15 per cent of the global finance needed to reverse that slide is on the table.

If Wall Street can raise trillions for oil exploration, it can surely underwrite a few billion for biodiversity—especially when Guyana has already built the monitoring systems, legal frameworks, and Indigenous-led governance investors demand.

Rich nations that applauded the Low Carbon Development Strategy in 2009 still owe on their rhetoric; now they must purchase the biodiversity credits they once encouraged Guyana to create.

There is also a moral calculus. Guyana emits a fraction of the carbon produced by the countries that fly in to praise its green credentials, yet it shoulders the cost of guarding a forest that cools their summers and steadies their floodplains.

Paying for those services is not charity; it is overdue rent on a planetary asset increasingly priced in catastrophe.

Hosting the Global Biodiversity Alliance secretariat in Georgetown cements the nation’s leadership, but leadership without liquidity will not keep poachers out or miners at bay.

The summit must close with cheques, not communiqué clauses.

When the ledger finally recognises that its biodiversity is worth more than a gold bracelet, Guyana’s bold stand will have become the world’s new business model—and we will all be shareholders in the safest blue-chip investment left on Earth: nature itself.