The premise of this site: climate change and nature loss are usually described as energy problems or land problems. Underneath, they are capital allocation problems. Coal plants, cattle pastures and container ships exist because streams of money keep them running — and solar farms, restored wetlands and green steel exist where streams of money were deliberately directed.
Much of this money moves by default — through subsidies that carry over year after year, and through costs, like the health effects of pollution, that never appear on any invoice. "Conscious cash" is this site's shorthand for the alternative: money directed with its full effects in view.
The good news is that redirecting money is far easier than inventing it. The sums needed to fund the solutions are small next to the flows already moving through the system, which is why redirecting them is a realistic lever.
The world's annual output
~$115trillion
Global GDP, 2025 — the pool all these flows are drawn from · IMF
Fossil fuel subsidies · 2024
$7.4trillion
6.4% of world GDP — $725B in direct handouts, $6.7T in unpriced damage · IMF
Nature's exchange rate
$30 : $1
For every dollar spent protecting nature, ~$30 flows to activities destroying it · UNEP
Clean energy investment · 2026
$2.2trillion
Already nearly double fossil investment — the conscious flow is real and growing · IEA
THE WORLD'S LEDGER
The largest planet-relevant money flows, side by side, in trillions of dollars per year. Three kinds of line items: flows linked to environmental damage, large flows shown for scale, and flows funding the transition.
HOW TO READEach bar is an annual flow in trillions of US dollars — hover any bar for detail. One caution: these come from different accounting systems (IMF, UNEP, IEA) and overlap — fossil subsidies and nature-negative flows partly count the same money — so read them as comparable magnitudes, never add them up.
Linked to environmental damage
For scale
Funding the transition
Worth noting: governments and markets route roughly ten times more money into fossil fuel subsidies and nature-negative activity than the combined growth needed in nature-based solutions and clean power to hit global targets.
SPENDING BY DEFAULT
The two biggest bars above deserve unpacking, because they are easy to misread.
The $7.4 trillion fossil subsidy is mostly invisible. Only $725 billion is governments directly discounting fuel. The other $6.7 trillion is "implicit" subsidy — the health damage from air pollution and the climate damage from emissions that fuel prices simply don't include. Those costs still get paid — in health impacts and climate damage — just not at the pump · IMF, 2025 update.
The $7.3 trillion nature-negative flow is the same phenomenon on the living world: public and private money financing over-extraction, conversion and pollution — about $1.7 trillion of it straight from public treasuries. It is roughly 30× larger than everything spent protecting and restoring nature · UNEP State of Finance for Nature.
What do these flows connect to? The trends documented in the two atlases:
Comparing what the energy transition and nature protection need against the flows above. The gaps are real — but they are small relative to the ledger.
Clean energy investment — $2.2T flowing nowneed: $4.5T/yr by 2030
Green bar = current flow; gold line = what the IEA's 1.5 °C pathway requires. The $2.3T gap ≈ one-third of the implicit fossil subsidy.
Nature-based solutions — $0.2T flowing nowneed: ~$0.54T/yr by 2030
The entire global nature funding gap (~$340B/yr) is under 5% of the money currently flowing to nature-negative activity — UNEP.
The takeaway: redirecting roughly 3% of world GDP — less than half of what already flows to fossil subsidies — would fully fund the 1.5 °C energy transition and close the nature gap. The technologies to spend it on are already working and getting cheaper each year → see the Solutions page.
HOW TO READ THIS SITE
Four pages, one argument. Follow them in order, then check the Landscape for what moved this quarter:
Gross domestic product — the total value of everything the world produces in a year (~$115T). The rough size of the pool these flows draw from.
Explicit vs implicit subsidy
Explicit = government directly pays to make fuel cheaper. Implicit = the damage (health, climate) that fuel causes but its price doesn't include — society pays it anyway, just not at the pump.
Nature-negative flows
UNEP's term for public and private money financing activities that degrade nature — harmful agricultural subsidies, over-extraction, conversion of habitat.
Nature-based solutions (NbS)
Investments in nature that solve human problems — reforestation, wetland restoration, mangrove coastal defense. Currently ~$200B/yr worldwide.
Trillion
A thousand billions. One trillion dollars a year ≈ $32,000 spent every second, all year.
Capital allocation
Deciding where money goes. The through-line of this site: where money flows has a large influence on environmental trends.