Gold Rush Risk Of Commodifying Nature
Date
12/26/2024 6:13:05 AM
(MENAFN- Asia Times)
To combat climate change and help nature to recover, a lot more investment is urgently needed. The UN's State of Finance for Nature report claims that if the world is to meet climate, biodiversity and land degradation targets, it needs to invest an extra US$4.1 trillion by 2050.
With most of the existing funding coming from public sources (US$133 billion), calls to close the“investment gap” are now focusing heavily on private investments, commonly referred to as green finance. Such is the power of this narrative that the need to involve corporate investors has come to be seen by many as self-evidently true .
There are a lot of initiatives looking to provide or secure private investments to restore nature, for example, through carbon and biodiversity markets. But a major risk is being overlooked: when we put a price on something given to us by nature, this fundamentally changes how we relate to it.
The entire global economy is already based on this commodification of nature . Food and fuel, for example, have been bought and sold for millennia. But now we are expanding the frontier to previously non-traded constituents of the natural world, such as carbon or biodiversity itself.
This process can change our relationship to those aspects of nature. For instance, while we may have once felt we had a moral obligation to save a certain species or habitat, once that form of nature is commodified, our motivations may switch to“conservation because it makes a profit.”
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