With the upcoming launch of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework and an accelerating sovereign debt crisis in many emerging economies related to COVID19, we analyze how the resurgent call for debt-for-nature swaps could conserve currently unprotected biodiversity priority-areas for six biomes and support debt restructuring in 67 countries under the World Bank’s debt service suspension initiative. Using novel methods and data, we find that the 67 countries hold over 22% of global priority-areas, 82.96% of which is unprotected. However, even when using conservative cost estimates, protecting 100% of those currently unprotected areas would only convert 0.1% of public debt for 35 of the 67 countries and would not significantly reduce debt levels. Applying DNS in the remaining countries would allow the protection of 11-13% of the Earth’s currently unprotected priority areas and would require particularly China to engage in swapping between USD2.8 and 5.5 billion in debt.