A motion has been proposed to the Scottish accutane online prices Parliament by MSP Patrick Harvie concerned that putting a price on the environment is the first step towards turning it into a commodity to be traded on financial markets.
We want to make the case to the Scottish Parliament that turning wildlife, forests, mountains and soil into commodities won’t protect nature.
If you live in Scotland you can write to your MSP now by using the e-action on the WDM website by clicking here.
As we make our last preparations for tonight’s ‘Forum on Natural Commons’ the World Forum on Natural Capital has also begun at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.
First Minister Alex Salmond will make the keynote speech at the conference, while corporations including RBS, Coca Cola, Rio Tinto and KPMG will be attempting to put a value on nature so that they can include it in their balance sheets.
Some corporations and governments, including the UK, claim that if the natural world is given a financial value it is more likely to be protected. But campaigners from the World Development Movement, Counter Balance, Re:Common and Carbon Trade Watch believe this is the first step to creating financial markets in water, air, soil and forests, effectively privatising nature.
In protest activists from the World Development Movement dressed as dodgy salesmen have been offering to sell Ben Nevis to the highest bidder outside the EICC (photos here). Loch Ness is also up for sale on eBay.
Members of our organisations have been inside the EICC today and you can follow their thoughts on Twitter at #notforsale. They will also be attending the Forum on Natural Commons tonight to share their reflections the other conference. Registration is now closed: for those who can’t attend in person we hope to provide a live stream of the evening.
Web poster by Jon Lander, click it to download and share on #notforsale
As delegates arrive in Edinburgh the great nature sale has already begun online with Ben Nevis going for a song on ebay. Have you put your bid in yet?
Supporters, speakers and organisers for tomorrow’s Forum on Natural Commons are also arriving coming from 14 organisations from across the Europe. We’ve also heard that we’re being joined by Brazilian activist Camila Moreno by video link from the UN climate change talks in Warsaw.
If you haven’t yet booked you’ve only a few hours to do so and spaces are limited. We hope you’ll us.
Our week of action and events is kicking off this evening with the Introductory Workshop at the University of Edinburgh. Spaces are still available and you can find out more on the workshop page.
Meanwhile final details of Thursday’s Forum on Natural Commons are announced with Cllr. Maggie Chapman (pictured, centre) confirmed as moderator and Morag Watson (pictured, left), Common Cause confirmed as our final speaker.
We’re also nearly ready to unveil our new photo exhibition which will be open to view over dinner at the Forum.
The conversation is getting started online and offline. Join in on Twitter at #notforsale.
Distinguished speakers from across Europe will be joining the Forum on Natural Commons including philosopher John O’Neill, University of Manchester (pictured, left).
Speakers Dr. Mike Hannis, Open University and Bec Sanderson, Common Cause (pictured, right) will contribute their viewpoints on the value of nature and Tamra Gilbertson from Carbon Trade Watch in Barcelona (pictured, centre) will be sharing her experiences of monitoring the carbon trading in the European Union.
We’ll discuss their contributions and those of our other speakers over dinner for an sociable and enlightening evening.
Places are free but limited for the Forum so we strongly encourage you to register as soon as you know you’re coming. We very much hope you’ll consider it.
Our first speakers are confirmed for the Forum on Natural Commons, 21 November in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Brazilian activist Camila Moreno will be joining us directly after representing Friends of the Earth Brazil at the UN Climate talks. We’ll also hear from global finance campaigner Nick Dearden on the links between the financial and ecological crisis and Antonio Tricarico from Re:Common in Italy.
We’ll be announcing many more speakers in the coming weeks, in the mean time register now to confirm your place for an wonderful evening of food and ideas.
This declaration has been signed by over 150 organisations from across the world. You can read the full list of signatories here.
The statement is open for signatures from organizations, groups, networks, associations, and collectives – if you would like to sign up just email nobiodiversityoffsets@gmail.com.
You can read more at the ‘No to Biodiversity Offsets‘ website.
Around the world, ecosystems and the communities that depend on them are harmed by large infrastructure projects, extractive industries and new financial markets.[1] To facilitate these activities, public and private entities are promoting new schemes to allow their environmental impacts to be ‘offset’. This could lead to an increase in damage, but even more concerning is that it commodifies nature. This is why the undersigned organisations are warning the world of the negative impacts of this false solution and saying “No to Biodiversity Offsetting.”
Biodiversity offsetting is the promise to replace nature destroyed and lost in one place with nature somewhere else. As with the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) and schemes to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD), biodiversity offsetting relies on ‘experts’ to create dubious calculations that claim to make one piece of the earth equal to another. It pretends you can trade places.
Who really benefits?
The introduction of biodiversity offsetting allows, or even encourages, environmental destruction with the promise that the habitat can be recreated elsewhere. This is beneficial to the companies doing the damage, since they can present themselves as a company that invests in environmental protection, thereby green-washing its products and services.
It also creates new business opportunities for intermediaries: conservation consultants to calculate what is lost, bankers to turn them into credits, traders to barter and speculate on them in new specialised markets and investors who want to profit from so called ‘natural capital’. “Natural capital” is an artificial concept based on questionable economic assumptions rather than ecological values that permits the commodification of nature.
All of this is happening with the strong involvement of state governments who are creating public policies to ensure that property rights over elements of nature such as carbon or biodiversity can be transferred to corporations and banks.
Biodiversity offsetting won’t prevent biodiversity loss
Nature is unique and complex. It is impossible to fully measure biodiversity, so suggestions that equivalent natural areas can be found is a fallacy. Some ecosystems take hundreds, even thousands of years to reach their current state – yet biodiversity offsetting pretends that a replacement can be found. Extensive research shows this is impossible.[2]
Biodiversity offsetting will harm communities
Biodiversity offsetting means environmental protection becomes a mere by-product of a commercial project, marginalising communities and threatening their right to life. Nature has an important social, spiritual and sustenance role for local communities, who define their territories through a balanced and historical relationship with land and nature. These values cannot be measured, priced nor offset any more than communities can simply move and live elsewhere.[3]
Biodiversity offsetting attempts to separate people from the environment in which they live, where their culture is rooted, where their economic activities have been traditionally taking place.
Biodiversity offsetting could increase biodiversity loss
Past cases of biodiversity offsetting shows how it opens up natural resources to further exploitation, and undermines communities’ rights to be able to manage and protect the natural commons. Examples include:
The new Forest Code in Brazil which allows land-owners to destroy forests if they buy ‘certificates of environmental reserves’ which are issued by the state and traded on BVRio, the ‘green stock market’ recently established by the government of Brazil.
The planned EU legislation on biodiversity offsetting (the so called “No Net Loss Initiative”) which could undermine existing environmental directives.
Public finance institutions such as the World http://buylevitra.net/levitra-suitable-men-diabetes-high-blood-pressure/ Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC, the World Bank private sector arm) and the European Investment Bank (EIB) are making biodiversity offsetting part of their standards and practices, permitting increased levels of offsetting to ‘compensate’ for the permanent environmental damage caused by the projects that they finance.
Destructive large infrastructure and extraction projects cannot be offset. Once an ecosystem is destroyed, it cannot be recreated elsewhere. In many places where biodiversity offsetting has been allowed, it has weakened existing laws to prevent destruction. If trading occurs (as it does with carbon offsetting), it paves the way for speculation by financial actors and private companies, threatening nature and the rights of communities dependent on it.
After seven years of carbon offsetting that has failed to reduce carbon emissions,[4] biodiversity offsetting should not be used to allow destruction that would have been illegal or contrary to local and national policy under environmental legislation or investment standards.
For these reasons, we reject any attempts to include biodiversity offsetting in any legislation, standards or public policies aimed at the creation of new markets with nature or ‘natural capital’ accounting.
Annex: some examples of Offsetting policies and projects
1. The UK government is planning to introduce biodiversity offsetting (the consultation is open until 7 November 2013). Initial offset cases show that the promise to ‘offset biodiversity’ is undermining planning laws that prevent destruction. Biodiversity offset providers are successfully interfering in the legislative process, undermining the democratic decision-making process and weakening the voice of communities.[5]
2. Notre Dame des Landes, France: a proposed airport that has been in pipeline for the past 40 years, to be built on over 1000 hectares (ha) of wetland, where farmers have been maintaining a traditional landscape and maintaining biodiversity. Offsetting was required by French biodiversity and water laws. ‘Biotope’ engineered a new methodology based on ‘functions’ rather than ‘hectares’, proposing that Vinci, the airport developer, offset only 600 ha. Local resistance against offsetting has so far prevented the project and challenged the proposed offsetting scheme. The European Commission is now intervening.
3. EU Biodiversity strategy 2020 – the EU is considering the possibility of legislation on biodiversity offsetting, which could include a “habitat bank” to permit offsetting species and habitats across EU borders. The aim is for no net loss of biodiversity, an important difference to the previous aim of no loss.
4. The World Bank has financed the large Weda Bay nickel and cobalt mining project in Indonesia. It is operated by the French mining company Eramet. The company is part of the BBOP (Business and Biodiversity Offsets Program).The project has already received a guarantee from MIGA (the World Bank arm covering the guarantee of economic and political risk of investors), and is supposed to receive new financing from the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JPIC), Coface and French Development Agency (AFD) for offsetting programme. The impacts on people and territories are massive and they are opposed by Indonesian and international civil society.
Notes
[1] Mining, energy, industrial logging, monoculture plantation and transport mega-projects are leading to increased land expropriation and land-use change, including the conversion of forests into industrial-scale agriculture. At the same time, in the name of energy security, large-scale efforts are underway to increase the extraction of conventional and unconventional fossil fuels, such as tar sands and shale gas.
[3] The disproportional and unjust burden of false solutions/offsettings to the most vulnerable communities, that are not responsible for environmental destruction, and whose livelihoods are directly dependent on a healthy environment and on the possibility to interact with it.
[4] http://scrap-the-euets.makenoise.org/english/
[6] See briefing by Les Amis de la Terre here: http://www.amisdelaterre.org/Mine-de-nickel-Weda-Bay-d-Eramet.html
On 21st November governments, international institutions, corporate actors and mainstream civil society groups will meet in Edinburgh for the first ‘World Forum on Natural Capital’.
Following the launch of the Natural Capital Declaration, promoted by major global banks at the occasion of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Rio in June 2012, business and governments are working to assign monetary value to services provided by nature’s different services, under the banner of the so-called “Green Economy”.
In an era dominated by global finance where trading money, risk and derivative products is more profitable than trading actual goods and services such a move comes as no surprise. Global finance requires the constant development of new assets: their next target, nature itself. This is what we call the financialisation of nature.
The first large scale implementation of this idea is the carbon market where carbon emissions are traded and as if it were financial commodities. Despite their profitability carbon markets have failed to addressing the climate crisis, succeeding only in generating huge profits to financial and corporate actors.
In order to enable the trading of nature and natural services an enormous amount of work is being done by consultancies, banks and governments to define what nature’s services are and how they can be commodified. That’s why the ‘World Forum on Natural Capital’ aims at giving a monetary value to all ecosystem services. The next step for banks and governments is to facilitate the trade in these services, as has already been done with carbon. This market is expected to be worth many trillions of dollars per year.
We believe nature’s value is priceless and has to be protected. That’s why we reject this new wave of commodification and financialisation of nature promoted by governments, corporations and banks. Putting a price on nature will not save it from pollution and destruction. To the contrary, these new commodities will only guarantee extra profits to the few, while leaving the environment at risk in the long-run.
Ecosystems and their services are common resources and must not be enclosed for private gain. Compliance with existing environmental regulation would be replaced with financial compensation. Instead of saying that a polluter does not have the right to pollute our common resources, markets sell that right. Once a price is put on nature, all of our common resources can be bought, sold and packaged. Worse, as we have seen in the recent financial crisis, a market can be manipulated, repackaged and resold as financial derivatives, bonds and other products.
Ultimately, accounting natural capital will result in increased exploitation of natural resources instead of protecting them. Join us in Edinburgh to stand up to global finance and share ideas to protect the commons for the benefit of all.
Berber Verpoest, Counter Balance
Antonio Tricarico, Re:Common