by Fiore Longo, Survival International
African Arguments, October 21, 2024
Some 31 years after the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) came into force, the latest Conference of the Parties – as the regular jamborees of governments, NGOs and others with a stake in these conventions are known – starts this week in the bustling Colombian city of Cali.
This one, COP16, is particularly important as it’s supposed to resolve some vital but unfinished business concerning the new global “action plan” for biodiversity, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Don’t be misled by the typically pedestrian title: what’s at stake here could dramatically affect millions of people around the world, especially Indigenous and local communities, because the Framework has a number of fatal flaws.
These collectively mean that what could, and should, have been a transformational initiative is instead repeating the same old approach to “biodiversity protection” – promoting a top-down, government- and international agency-driven colonial model that is rooted in racism and has been comprehensively discredited but persists nonetheless.
Symptomatic of how the new action plan was co-opted from the start was the decision to finance its implementation not by setting up an innovative global fund, as many nations in the Global South wanted, but rather to establish a fund under the auspices of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a long-standing collaboration between the World Bank, various UN agencies, and governments.
The choice of the Global Environment Facility was highly problematic as the organization does not require that Indigenous peoples have the right to Free, Prior and Informed Consent over any projects it funds which may affect their lives, lands and rights.
And because the new fund, known as the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), is in a sense a subsidiary of the GEF, it has adopted its rules. The result is that it will only accept proposals to fund new biodiversity projects from one of the designated “GEF Agencies”. This is a group of 18 institutions all of which are multinational development banks or big conservation corporations like WWF or Conservation International that have long histories of complicity in human rights violations.
Following the money
Survival has analyzed the documentation for all the 22 projects that have so far been approved. What we’ve found suggests that the worst fears of the GBFF’s critics were amply justified:
- Only one of the 22 projects so far approved will likely be of benefit to Indigenous people and is clearly directed to them.
- The total fees to be paid to the proposer agencies – that is, above and beyond actual project activity costs – comes to 24% of the total funds available. The proportion of project funds staying within these agencies will likely be higher still.
- Of the proposing (and implementing) agencies, the US chapter of WWF has been the most successful in capturing funds. Its five approved projects or concepts (including preparation grants) account for $36 million, almost exactly a third of the total funding. The next most successful – the UN Development Program (UNDP) and Conservation International (CI), which have nine and two projects respectively – account for about a quarter of the total funds each. Together with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, these agencies will receive 85% of the first $110 million in funding.
- One of the projects will fund (through WWF) Protected Areas in Africa which have long histories of dispossession of Indigenous people from their lands and brutality against them by eco-guards.
A huge chunk of funding is going towards the “30×30” target to increase the extent of Protected Areas to 30% of the Earth’s land and seas by 2030. This is of particular concern because National Parks, wildlife reserves and other conservation areas are already one of the biggest threats to Indigenous peoples.
Such parks have almost always involved brutal evictions and exclusions, violence and destruction of Indigenous livelihoods. These problems continue today, such as in the horrifying eviction of thousands of Maasai people from the Ngorongoro Conservation Area in Tanzania.
Survival International believes that the structure and operation of this whole funding model is fundamentally flawed. It is tilted strongly in favor of “business as usual”, top-down, conservation projects, rather than promoting a new, and much-needed, rights-based approach to biodiversity protection. And it’s almost entirely inaccessible to Indigenous people themselves.
We believe that the entire funding mechanism should be reconsidered. The GBFF needs to be given a completely new direction, wherein funding is primarily directed to Indigenous peoples and local communities. The funding of new or expanded “fortress conservation” projects should be prohibited.
More generally, the extraordinarily large sums (such as $700 billion annually) supposedly needed for biodiversity protection are being proposed by conservation corporations with a vested interest in creating such targets. Far less funding for biodiversity protection would really be required if the emphasis were to be on wider recognition of Indigenous peoples’ lands and rights, rather than the expensive, colonial, top-down, militarized approach, which remains the economic mainstay of the conservation industry.
Biodiversity credits: a new threat
As if all that were not worrying enough, the COP16 meeting will see the launch of a number of initiatives to create biodiversity credits.
The concept of biodiversity credits is similar to that of carbon markets, where companies or organizations can supposedly “offset” their climate change-causing pollution by buying carbon credits from projects elsewhere that believed to be preventing carbon emissions or actively remove carbon from the atmosphere. In reality, both the idea and the practice are deeply flawed: such projects put a price on nature, treating Indigenous and local communities’ lands as a carbon stock to be exchanged in the market so polluters can keep polluting, whilst the conservation industry benefits to the tune of billions of dollars. Indigenous peoples and local communities, on the other hand, end up dispossessed and stripped of their livelihoods.
Biodiversity credits, like carbon credits, are part of a new push for the commodification of nature. A recent statement from more than 250 environmental, human rights, development and community organisations worldwide (including Survival International) calls for an immediate suspension of the development of biocrediting schemes.
As well as the technical, moral, philosophical and practical problems with putting a price on the conservation of species or entire ecosystems, and trading them against destruction elsewhere, the idea poses a serious threat to Indigenous peoples. They would face growing pressure from land grabs as bio-offsetting projects seek to profit from the often rich biodiversity of the places in which Indigenous peoples live and that they have managed for generations.
Similar problems have occurred many times with carbon offsetting schemes already. Many Indigenous leaders simply say that the commodification of nature implicit in biocrediting and trading runs counter to their worldviews and values.
So how much hope is there for this COP? Not much, is the honest answer. The whole process of biodiversity protection has been captured almost as soon as it’s started by the same institutions that have enriched themselves at the expense of Indigenous peoples – the guardians of much of the world’s biodiversity – for decades.
At the very least, the right of Indigenous peoples to give – or withhold – their Free, Prior and Informed Consent to any project that affects them must be respected. Indigenous organizations, together with allies, will be doing everything possible to ensure it is.
The answer to how to protect the world’s biodiversity is really quite straightforward: respect Indigenous peoples’ land rights, and tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity destruction, namely the exploitation of the world’s resources for profit. How refreshing it would be if that were top of the COP agenda.
Fiore Longo is a researcher and campaigner at Survival International, the global movement for Indigenous peoples. She is also the director of Survival International France and Spain, and co-ordinates Survival’s Decolonize Conservation campaign.
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