This post was originally published on this site
The stakes are high at the 2022 Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15), underway now in Montréal. On the table is a new Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). A strong GBF could put the world on a path to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, and help to tackle the intertwined climate, inequality and human rights crises.
However, Indigenous and other land rights-holders and civil society groups are raising the alarm about corporations’ efforts to water down ambitions and sideline talks with empty jargon, dubious claims, junk reporting and dangerous efforts to further commodify nature.
Around one million plant and animal species face extinction, some within decades. Lands, forests and waters are being destroyed or degraded at an alarming rate. Biodiversity loss is limiting our resilience and capacity to adapt to climate change.
The loss of bees and other pollinators is threatening our food supply and human encroachment on ecosystems is leaving us more exposed to the zoonotic diseases that could cause future pandemics.
Read: Every whale is worth $2 million? Why it’s time to add the value of nature to GDP
And: Cookies and wet markets: Here’s where coronavirus and climate change collide
The world’s leading biodiversity scientists maintain that the only way to end the crisis is through bold, transformative change — by tackling the key drivers of deforestation, including deforestation
LB00,
the loss and fragmentation of habitats, industrial livestock
LC00,
and agriculture production, pollution, the introduction of alien species, as well as addressing power inequalities, injustice, and by developing inclusive decision-making, including valuing those who have best cared for nature, such as Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Shamefully, despite playing a significant role in drafting the original Convention on Biological Diversity in the early nineties, the U.S. remains the only member of the United Nations yet to ratify it. This glaring omission must be urgently rectified, which will take a vote of Congress to accomplish.
Rights-holders (such as Indigenous Peoples, peasants and environmental defenders) and civil society groups are raising the alarm about corporations’ efforts to lobby for short term, profit-driven measures into what needs to be long term, science-driven commitments.
False solutions such as fortress conservation (colonial-style efforts to “protect nature” by evicting the very local communities who have been nurturing it), biodiversity offsets or calls for company self-reporting are dangerous distractions designed to defend and entrench corporate power. We also need radical change in the way we use, share and care for land, including transforming a broken global food system.
The Global Biodiversity Framework must include a strong commitment to halt biodiversity loss. Deforestation and the conversion of natural ecosystems must stop immediately and we need to tackle the widespread use of toxic chemicals. This means an end to subsidies to harmful industries and tackling excessive consumption, which is a major driver of biodiversity loss.
The Global Biodiversity Framework must also include strong and binding language on human rights. It must clearly outline that states must have strong, enforced laws and regulations to hold corporations — including the financial sector — responsible for the harms they cause to nature and people. Businesses must also be required to reduce, and ultimately end, their adverse impacts on biodiversity. The GBF must definitively recognize that we cannot protect biodiversity without requiring that financing is shifted to align with its goals.
The world cannot halt and reverse biodiversity loss without tackling the massive flows of capital that is driving so much nature destruction. We in civil society are ready, and eager, to support governments to put in place the strong laws and regulations needed to shift financial flows. This means ensuring real consequences for financiers and other businesses linked to environmental abuses, that deliver reparations and remedy for people and ecosystems harmed, and that steer development to true ecological and social sustainability.
Banks, investors, and asset managers must also act to clean up their financing, end greenwashing and show that they won’t stand in the way of strong laws on corporate accountability.
Read: ‘Anti-woke’ reaction? Fund giant Vanguard quits net-zero climate alliance.
Global corporations such as financial institutions and extractive industries are serial offenders when it comes to nature destruction and human rights harms. They are in no way qualified to be making recommendations. This includes corporate efforts at COP15 to heavily influence and water down initiatives like the Taskforce for Nature Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). In essence, corporations are undermining calls for strong state regulation of corporations and harmful industries, by suggesting instead all we need is more company self-reporting – based on frameworks written entirely by corporations themselves.
Read: Climate change and diversity efforts are profitable, report says — here’s how much
The solutions we need are not hard to understand. We need global corporations – including finance – to reduce, and ultimately end, all adverse impacts on biodiversity. This starts by ensuring that those responsible for environmental and human rights abuses are regulated and held to account. Instead, business lobbies are trying to confuse us with the loose language of ‘nature positive’ and similarly empty terms designed to preserve the status quo.
We stand behind the Indigenous Peoples, women’s organizations, youth movements and peasant organizations who have been at the forefront of protecting and valuing all the diverse life on this planet, and driving the true solutions we need to save it. It is their voices that must be valued, amplified and prioritized at Montréal.
Merel vann der Mark is forest and finance coalition coordinator at Rainforest Action Network.
