Who will fund biodiversity conservation, and its implications for Africa?
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By African Centre for Biodiversity
Where adequate funds will come from to reduce rampant biodiversity loss is crucial to ensuring the implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework. African countries are demanding that developed countries pay for their ecological debt and implementation of the GBF, in accordance with Article 20 of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
But how will these resources be mobilized? What are the implications and outcomes of development aid, international funds from multilateral banks and the private sector for the future development of developing countries? The geopolitical nature of the negotiations is not only limiting the ability of the GBF to be ambitious, but also its potential to tackle systemic global inequalities.
While countries in the Global South want to ensure that their development is not hindered, the current trajectory of the negotiations are moving toward adopting an array of false solutions, such as Nature Based Solutions and other market-based mechanisms, without considering the structural issues driving biodiversity loss. In this regard, development is synonymous with industrialization, which has and continues to cause serious biodiversity loss, anthropogenic climate change and social harms.
Despite the need for reorienting development pathways, there is a frightening lack of imagination as to how this can be achieved, beyond the reliance on extraction, exploitation (of nature and people), oppression, patriarchy and systemic racism.
It is with this in mind, that we need to consider how domestic and international resources will be mobilized.
Parties are reminded of Recommendation 3/6 adopted by the SBI, with paragraph 40 (f) calling for the relationship between public debt, austerity measures and implementation of the Convention to be investigated. It acknowledges their deleterious role on domestic resources, and hence implementation of the Convention. The brackets around paragraph 40(f) should be removed and the paragraph included in the COP decision.
There is an urgent need to address these structural issues and place safeguards to ensure
resources do not serve the interest of a few people, countries and corporations, but one that promotes ecologically sustainable development and protects the rights of people and nature.
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