Environmentalism with a dollar sign

Sep 28, 2024 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – President Irfaan Ali’s announcement of plans to convene a Global Biodiversity Alliance strikes as both opportunistic and vulgar. While the preservation of the environment is a noble goal, Ali’s plan appears to be a continuation of Guyana’s crude, crass, and cynical strategy to cash in on its natural resources under the pretext of conservation.

The president’s proposal isn’t just a rhetorical flourish; it is a full-throated embrace of the market’s favorite solution to the world’s environmental crises: monetize the problem, package it up for sale, and collect the proceeds. This is environmentalism at its most crass.

At first blush, it seems as though Guyana’s intentions might be in line with global efforts to stem the loss of biodiversity, which, by some accounts, is dwindling at an alarming rate. By President Ali’s own admission, some 50% of the world’s biodiversity is being lost.

However, instead of confronting this crisis with the gravity it deserves, Ali’s administration has proposed creating new markets—markets for biodiversity credits, scaling debt swaps and accelerating biodiversity bonds. What’s absent in this ambitious financialization of biodiversity is any meaningful discourse about arresting biodiversity loss out of a moral obligation. Guyana, it is not about preventing species extinction or ensuring environmental sustainability for its own sake. It is, in essence, about the cash.

Guyana’s original Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS), introduced under President Bharrat Jagdeo, had a singular focus: the monetization of the nation’s vast forests. Under the veil of environmental protection, it was a play to leverage the country’s forests for carbon credits, positioning Guyana as a recipient of international funds while claiming to combat climate change.

Jagdeo’s LCDS lacked a strong focus on biodiversity. The expansion of this framework to include biodiversity came later, only after David Granger’s Green State Development Strategy sought to center biodiversity protection, coastal zone, and water management as integral parts of environmental stewardship. Now, Ali’s administration has co-opted this expanded scope, not as a matter of principle, but seemingly as another avenue for financial gain.

What is most vulgar about this new push is the fact that Guyana is already receiving substantial payments for preserving its forests through carbon credits. To suggest that the country can now also profit from its biodiversity within those very same forests is akin to double-dipping.

Guyana, under the auspices of environmental conservation, wants to draw from two financial wells simultaneously: one for its carbon reserves and another for its biodiversity. Yet, both sets of payments revolve around the same resource—the forests. While the carbon credits aim to compensate for not cutting down trees and maintaining the forest as a carbon sink, the biodiversity credits will supposedly reward the country for preserving the species and ecosystems within those same forests. This sleight of hand—dressing up an existing scheme with new terminology—is environmentalism with dollar signs, not conscience.

At the heart of this issue lies a crude commodification of nature that ought to trouble anyone who still believes in the intrinsic value of the environment. Ali’s proposed Global Biodiversity Alliance is not a new idea. In fact, it is a poor replica of the existing Global Biodiversity Credit Alliance, which already seeks to use market mechanisms to help protect the world’s biodiversity. But markets are fickle, and the idea that biodiversity can be saved through financial instruments such as bonds and swaps is an illusion. Environmental preservation requires more than just capital investments and corporate endorsements. It requires a fundamental shift in human behavior, an acknowledgment of the delicate interdependencies that exist within ecosystems, and a moral commitment to protect species for their own sake, not because they can be monetized.

But let’s not be naïve. Guyana’s entry into the biodiversity market is not driven by an epiphany that the planet’s species are worth protecting. It is, in fact, a calculated effort to chase the next big environmental payday. This approach is particularly cynical given that Guyana has already positioned itself as a “climate leader” by commodifying its forests. Now, by attempting to monetize its biodiversity, Guyana is shamelessly trying to position itself as a leader in conservation, when in reality, it is leading the charge in turning nature into a transactional good.

President Ali’s speech at the United Nations may have been well-received by those eager to hear solutions to the world’s ecological crises, but there was no mention of what meaningful biodiversity conservation actually entails—far from it. Instead, what is being proposed is essentially the hawking of biodiversity credits.

The unspoken truth is that markets are not designed to save the environment. They are designed to generate profits. This is a basic tenet of capitalism, and any attempt to dress it up as environmentalism is deceitful. The global loss of biodiversity is not a market failure; it is a failure of human responsibility. We should be protecting biodiversity not because it can be sold or traded, but because it is essential to life on this planet. And yet, in the rush to financialize nature, we are erasing the ethical foundation of conservation. What should be preserved as a global common good is instead being carved up and packaged for sale.

President Ali needs to understand that his administration’s environmental policy cannot be a mere extension of Jagdeo’s flawed approach. Jagdeo’s LCDS was controversial because it was primarily a financial scheme dressed up as climate action. Ali risks making the same mistake, but with even broader implications. If Guyana’s environmental policy is reduced to a series of transactions, it will be devoid of the moral weight necessary to address the pressing ecological challenges of our time.

Rather than doubling down on this crass strategy to commodify biodiversity, Guyana needs to rethink its environmental platform. Conservation cannot simply be about cashing in on the world’s crises. It requires a profound commitment to the future of the planet, a commitment that transcends the pursuit of profit.

If President Ali wants to carve out a meaningful place for Guyana in the global environmental movement, he needs to abandon the crude logic of commodification and embrace a more holistic approach to conservation—one that recognizes the value of nature beyond its market price. Otherwise, his Global Biodiversity Alliance will be remembered not as a bold step toward environmental preservation, but as a vulgar display of opportunism in the face of planetary peril.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

• Global Biodiversity Alliance, President Irfaan Ali