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Protected areas cover more than one quarter of European land, largely as part of the European Union's Natura 2000 network. New proposals aim to expand this coverage, but experts are divided when it comes to the “biodiversity economy”.
WWF and the World Economic Forum have urged world leaders to adopt mandatory requirements to disclose impacts on biodiversity by 2030 with a “Business for Nature” campaign. Meanwhile, over 110 experts from academia and civil society have signed an open letter rejecting this "nature-positive economy".
“Behind this innocuous sounding name lies a push to ‘financialise’ the destruction of biodiversity via meaningless monetary valuations of ecosystem services and biodiversity offsetting,” said Frederic Hache, founder of the Green Finance Observatory and one of the letter’s signatories.
In their view, the philosophical debate around nature’s value, the legacy of an imperialist approach to ecosystems, has become an economic one.
According to the signatories, the nature-positive agenda “promotes a meaningless monetary valuation of nature” and results in “biodiversity offsetting”. Offsetting, however, is “often unlikely to be feasible within reasonable timeframes or [is] prohibitively costly [... It] is not about curbing destruction, at best displac[ing] it”. Furthermore, it “has also been found to often result in land-grabbing [and] conflicts over land use and human rights abuse”, and “could transfer critical conservation decisions for our future to financial markets and their well-known irrational mood swings”, they write.
“While there are only six greenhouse gases, there are millions of species with incredibly complex webs of interdependencies”, they say. These critics fear a new episode of what happened with carbon markets 15 years ago.
Carbon-offset credits may never be a good solution to the problem they address, says Hache. That is because – quoting the former chair of the Australian carbon markets regulator Andrew Macintosh – "the minute you fix integrity, prices will go through the roof”. “Biodiversity offsetting has been shown to have worse environmental integrity issues than carbon offsetting, while creating the same risks of land-grabbing and conflicts over land use.”
The letter calls on the EU Commission to “instead put in place tighter environmental regulations mandating a reduction in biodiversity destruction” ahead of this week’s COP15 UN summit in Montreal.
The EU strategy
As part of its new Biodiversity strategy, the European Commission adopted a proposal for a Nature Restoration Law last June.
This should help achieve the following binding targets:
- restore habitats and species protected by the EU nature legislation;
- reverse the decline of pollinators by 2030;
- no net loss of green urban spaces by 2030 and a minimum of 10% tree canopy cover in European cities;
- improved biodiversity on farmland e.g. for grassland butterflies, farmland birds, high-diversity landscape features;
- restore drained peatlands;
- healthier forests with improved biodiversity;
- at least 25,000 km free-flowing rivers by 2030;
- restore seagrasses and sea bottoms.
A fact sheet presenting the law pointed out that “every 1 euro invested into nature restoration adds €8 to €38 in benefits”.
Biodiversity market
With its post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity is trying to protect at least 30% of land and sea areas globally by 2030 “through effective, equitably managed, ecologically representative and well-connected systems of protected areas”.
The convention also aims at “redirecting, repurposing, reforming or eliminating incentives harmful for biodiversity, in a just and equitable way, reducing them by at least $500 billion [approx as many euro] per year”.
At the same time, the convention calls for a “$200 billion increase in international financial flows from all sources to developing countries”.
A 2017 study, focused on biodiversity offsets and compensation mechanisms in Europe, showed that “most compensatory mitigation activity to date has been driven by one-off offsets, which has accounted for more than 90% of total land area conserved as of 2015”.
“Compared to 2017, when the topic wasn’t mainstream, we now have a mature political context despite the current energy crisis, so there are many drivers for developing an offsetting market,” says Alessandro Leonardi, a researcher at the University of Padova and co-founder of the consultancy company Etifor. “Slowly, a framework for the private sector is making its appearance.”
The Science-Based Targets for Nature (SBTN) aim to define how companies can measure and track their impacts on nature. Whenever an impact on biodiversity is inevitable, the targets establish rules for creating or restoring a habitat of the same size.
Old-fashioned colonialism
According to Fiore Longo, campaigner for the indigenous movement Survival International, this agenda has no scientifically proven beneficial effects and may even cause harm. “Terms like ‘restoration’ and ‘rewilding’ can have injustice embedded within them, because they presume that whatever exists on the ground is a problem,” she said.
“I think that we need to be extremely careful with concepts like ‘rewilding’ or ‘restoring’, which are different concepts but related,” Longo added. “Seeing as most of Earth’s ecosystems have long been modified by humans, the choice as to what condition, from what era, the ecosystem should be restored or rewild to, is highly contentious, and arbitrary”.
Conversely, scientists have observed more positive effects when indigenous peoples and local communities retain rights to their lands and are involved in decisions about conservation.
The recent Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) found that, “based on the systematic review of about 15,000 scientific and government sources that although nature managed by indigenous peoples and local communities is under increasing pressure, it is generally declining less rapidly than in other lands”.
IPBES noted that “three-quarters of the land-based environment and about 66% of the marine environment have been significantly altered by human actions” but “on average these trends have been less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by indigenous peoples and local communities.”
Modern environmentalism, considered to be born in the 1960s with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring as a key marker, may be outdated. As senior lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University Céline Germond-Duretexplained, “there is a need for a post-colonial conservation regime”.
Systemic change
In her view, the negotiations of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework were a chance to begin a systemic change.
“Nature conservation is a noble and important cause, even an emergency, as we are heading towards an era of irreversible damage,” says Germond-Duret. “Ultimately, conservationists and indigenous peoples have a common interest: the protection of biodiversity, albeit underpinned by different values and understandings of the relationship between people and nature”.
This story is part of “The Green Veins of Europe: eco corridors and the European Green Deal” series, supported by Journalismfund.eu through the Investigation Grants for Environmental Journalism.
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