Market systems or earth systems?

Corporations - including the finance sector - should change their behaviour, but instead they are seeking ways to avoid systemic change. 

Economies around the world are based on endless growth, which in turn means ever-increasing extraction, exploitation, consumption and related biodiversity destruction, and greenhouse gas emissions. Corporations - including the finance sector - should change their behaviour, but instead they are seeking ways to avoid systemic change. Therefore, they say the problem is that ‘nature’ has no value in the market, so the ‘solution’ is to give it a price by marketing ‘ecosystem services’  for privatisation and exploitation. This means that when ‘services’ such as regulating climate or providing water, food and medicine become scarce, their market value and the profits to be gained will increase accordingly.

The financialisation project has assumed many disguises over the  years, using different kinds of market instruments such as REDD and REDD+, the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), wetland banking, Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), and Payments for Ecosystem services (PES). Now there are new terms that conceal these instruments behind positive-sounding concepts, such as Nature-based Solutions and “Nature-Positive”. In this context, the drive to turn at least 30% of all land and oceans into ‘protected areas’, with ‘nature’ used as carbon sinks to offset continued emissions of greenhouse gases, becomes just another booster for the financialisation project.

Read the in-depth article on this topic here: https://radicalecologicaldemocracy.org/marketing-the-planet-the-financialization-of-nature/#_edn 

 

By Helena Paul 

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