Greening the financial system is essential,but the environment can’t be shoehorned into the logic of finance
If 2019 was the year that climate finance went mainstream, 2020 promises to give nature a seat at the green finance table. Biodiversity loss was flagged as one of the top five global threats at this year’s World Economic Forum. Investors are moving “beyond carbon” to assess companies’ biodiversity outcomes.
Biodiversity is difficult to shoehorn into a market-based financial framework. The political and ethics-riddled reality of conservation raises questions about privileging private finance as a dominant actor, and reveals problems inherent in an information-based approach to resolving the ecological crisis.
The extension of markets into nature has had darker, human consequences. Market-based schemes such as the UN’s Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation have fuelled land grabs in the Global South, where people were evicted from their lands as companies privatise forest for conservation. Markets require private property regimes to function. But such regimes are often incompatible with people whose cultures and means for prosperity are embedded within surrounding ecosystems.
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