How can we actually protect nature?

If financialization isn’t the pathway forward, what is?

Last week, we shared some of the many pitfalls of putting a price on nature as a way to protect it. This raises the question – if financializing nature isn’t the right path forward, what is? How can we protect nature from degradation without putting it into the hands of the global financial system? 

Luckily, there are many pathways to pursue, and a combination of all of them will likely be what sets us on the right course. Different solutions will be appropriate to different contexts – Indigenous-led conservation might be the right path in some countries, but in other places where this kind of connection to the land is rarer, other solutions are needed. 

This week, we’ll walk through some of the many ways we can reach conservation goals while preserving other important things like social justice, democracy, and long-term sustainability. 

Rights of Nature 

The rights of nature is a burgeoning movement with the potential to enshrine the intrinsic value of nature into legal systems around the world. Ecuador was the first country in the world to recognize the rights of nature in its constitution, and other nations including India, Bolivia, Panama, and New Zealand have introduced rights of nature laws. There is also a growing movement to recognize ecocide as a criminal activity, punishable in international legal tribunals. This takes an entirely different approach than financialization – rather than putting a price on nature, it recognizes and legally protects nature as a rightsholder.  

Rewilding and citizen science 

Engaging individuals and communities in conservation is another important avenue for change. Initiatives like rewilding and crowdsourcing have real promise to democratize conservation and put it back into the hands of communities. Organizations like Mossy Earth allow individuals to actively participate in conservation projects, encouraging citizen science to take root in places around the world. Other initiatives like the platform Instant Wild upload camera trap footage placed in conservation areas, encouraging users to identify wildlife in the images. This process takes an extremely long time if done by small research teams, who often have a backlog of footage. There has to be a consensus of at least ten people to agree before identification is met, but people don’t need any particular qualifications to participate. Projects like these encourage broad public participation in achieving conservation goals.

Global food systems reform 

Another core priority will be reforming our global food system, which is the single largest driver of deforestation through land use change. Biodiversity is crucial to the survival of our food system, and yet our current practices lead to widespread biodiversity loss. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Other agricultural methods are protective of biodiversity, but it depends what path we choose to take. 

Addressing this problem will require transforming food production through regenerative and sustainable techniques including agroecology, silvopasture, no-till farming, and more, combined with a shift towards plant-based diets. Rather than relentlessly pursuing industrialized agriculture through cash crops designed for export, we must re-localize our food systems and build solidarity with La Via Campesina and other organizations in the global food sovereignty movement fighting for more just and sustainable food systems. 

Another pathway is reforming agricultural subsidies. Right now, billions of dollars are poured into propping up the industrial agricultural system. These subsidies should be reconsidered, instead being put towards supporting more sustainable agricultural practices. Other government-supported programs like the UK’s Environmental Land Management Schemes or India’s Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana (PKVY) offer farmers payments for environmental public goods like soil health restoration or help them form into organic “cluster” farms that receive easier organic certification.

Conservation finance (with caveats) 

Although most of the last article argued against financialization, under very specific circumstances, market-based solutions have their place. Conservation finance, when done well, can have enormously beneficial impacts. With a $120 million initial investment, the Indigenous-led organization Coast Funds has helped prevent logging in three million hectares of the Great Bear Rainforest in Haida Gwaii while creating 1,200+ jobs and supporting 100+ businesses. The African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) has helped restore 2.27 million acres of land across 15 countries. These positive success stories demonstrate what is possible when restoration efforts are led by communities and governments, not profit-driven investors. 

Land tenure and rights-based conservation

The last article focused on the promise of Indigenous-led conservation, but another important part of the process is restoring legal land tenure to Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs). This is often called “rights-based conservation.” Although most of the world’s biodiversity is already protected by these communities, they often do not have legal tenure for the lands they are stewarding. There is already a formal mechanism to recognize these lands, called Indigenous and Community Conserved Areas, but there has been slow uptake in establishing them. This is a problem, because it leaves these lands vulnerable to appropriation–even in the name of conservation. It’s also unjust that the world is benefiting from the conservation practices of IPLCs while continually failing to give them legal protections and rights to the land they steward. 

The evidence for land tenure as a conservation pathway abounds: one study found that Indigenous lands have significantly higher species diversity and population than non-Indigenous lands. In Latin America, deforestation rates are 2-3 times lower in legally recognized Indigenous lands. Giving land tenure is also a far less expensive way to conserve biodiversity than many existing programs, but no less effective. As a result, rights-based conservation should be at the top of the global agenda. 

Empowering governments 

Governments around the world, in partnership with local communities, must also increase public investment in conservation and enforce stricter conservation policies. Nature is a public good, and it should be financed with public dollars that do not require market-rate returns. Public spending on conservation has been shown to result in reduced biodiversity loss. In particular, governments could redirect harmful subsidies toward funding conservation outcomes; according to some estimates, global subsidies for extractive industries currently total $1.9 trillion per year. 

Governments can also use financial regulation as a way to promote conservation goals by imposing restrictions on lending to economic activities that are linked to environmental degradation. This approach has seen success in Brazil, where exclusions on access to credit for certain firms helped reduce deforestation between 2003 and 2011. 

But many governments currently cannot do this because of debt. Sovereign indebtedness worsens ecological degradation by forcing Global South governments to earn dollars from export-led extractive projects (i.e. raw materials or cash crops) in order to satisfy interest payments owed to international creditors. 

As the secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity has noted, much agricultural expansion in the Global South that is linked to deforestation is in turn fueled by a need to “earn hard currency to pay their debts to international lenders.” These conditions are substantially worsened by climate vulnerability, which creates a vicious cycle in which borrowing costs rise for the most climate-impacted nations, further limiting their ability to fund adaptation measures, thus worsening their climate vulnerability, thus further reducing their credit ratings. 

Conservation targets will not be met without cancelling debts, introducing a global sovereign bankruptcy mechanism, and reforming the international financial architecture to redirect capital towards nations in the Global South. 

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All of these pathways show real promise to help curb the rapid biodiversity and ecosystem loss we’re currently experiencing. None of them are “the” solution on their own – we need to apply different ones across scales to address the diverse needs of different ecosystems, countries, and communities. 

The problem is that many of these solutions are significantly underinvested in compared to the fervour around market-based solutions. Market-based and top-down conservation approaches are the most institutionally popular approaches today. This needs to change. 

And what needs to change, most urgently, is the way we view our relationship with the earth. The only reason that financialization seems like a viable solution at all is because we see nature as something that has no intrinsic value. If we saw it as something alive, sacred, and deserving of inherent protection, the idea of putting a price on it and selling its “services” on the market would be unthinkable.

To do that, we begin with ourselves. Becoming curious about our own beliefs about nature: how we were raised to see it, whether we align with those views, and how we might like to see it differently are all places to begin. Change often comes from culture – from a practice becoming unacceptable in the hearts and minds of people and demanding it to change. In other words, if we don’t feel personally invested in this, things probably won’t change. Exerting pressure is necessary, and it takes a great number of us to have an effect. But with enough of it, there is no limit to how completely we can remake the world. 

1. The book The Rights of Nature by David Boyd is a great way to learn more about the growing movement to establish the rights of nature

2. The documentary All that Breathes is an exploration of the journey of two brothers in New Delhi who set out to save a bird species at risk of extinction.

3. The news site Mongabay is a great source to follow conservation-related news. This article looks into who is really tracking global ecosystem restoration—and how.