Regulated Destruction: How Biodiversity Offsetting Enables
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
REGULATED DESTRUCTION How biodiversity offsetting enables environmental destruction Author Jutta Kill The research for this publication was carried out between February and October 2018. Design Somerset Bean Image credits Cover, p5, p24 Community agroecology and agro-forestry project, Sungai Buri, Sarawak, Indonesia. Members of the women’s group picking vegetables. Amelia Collins/Friends of the Earth International p11 Penang Inshore Fishermen Welfare Association (PIFWA), Mangrove Education Centre, Seberang Perai Selatan, Penang, Malaysia. Amelia Collins/Friends of the Earth International p21 Community agroecology and agro-forestry project, Sungai Buri, Sarawak, Indonesia, Members of the women’s group including the two women leaders. Amelia Collins/Friends of the Earth International Friends Of The Earth International is the world’s largest grassroots environmental network with 73 member groups and over two million members and supporters around the world. Our vision is of a peaceful and sustainable world based on societies living in harmony with nature. We envision a society of interdependent people living in dignity, wholeness and fulfilment in which equity and human and peoples’ rights are realised. This will be a society built upon peoples’ sovereignty and participation. It will be founded on social, economic, gender and environmental justice and be free from all forms of domination and exploitation, such as neoliberalism, corporate globalisation, neo-colonialism and militarism. We believe that our children’s future will be better because of what we do. www.foei.org [email protected] Follow us twitter.com/foeint facebook.com/foeint REGULATED DESTRUCTION How biodiversity offsetting enables environmental destruction Introduction 4 1 What is biodiversity offsetting? 5 2 Regulated destruction: How biodiversity offsetting undermines 11 environmental protection National approaches to compensation offsets 12 India | Compensatory afforestation 12 Uganda | National Environment Bill introduces biodiversity offsets 13 into national law Canada | Biodiversity offsetting opens up habitat of endangered 14 species to tar sand industry Colombia | Biodiversity offsets and domestic carbon markets 15 facilitate corporate destruction Brazil | Forest restoration credits and Environmental Services 17 Incentives System Costa Rica | Pioneering financialization of natural wealth 19 accounting and implementing the world’s first aquatic offset Different tools, same outcome 20 3 How offsetting enables continued destruction in areas of special 21 importance to biodiversity When perpetuity doesn’t last 23 4 Offsetting | Instrument of choice for corporations losing social license 24 to operate Global food corporations and agroindustry pledge to ‘end deforestation’ 25 REDD+ | A tool for greenwashing corporate land use 25 Green airports? Biodiversity and carbon offsetting in the aviation industry 27 5 Final reflections 29 Introduction This publication forms part of a series of two. It explores offsetting, even where it is not required by a country’s how financialization of nature1 as a central plank of the environmental regulation. The examples cited demon- green growth discourse has evolved since the turn of the strate how unreliable offsetting commitments are. millennium. With REDD+i, international forest policy has also been This report looks at how financialization of nature allows strongly influenced by financialization of nature. More corporate destruction to continue behind a smokescreen of than a decade ago, REDD+ was introduced at the UN cli- market-based environmental instruments. Compensation mate negotiations with the expectation that as a financing offsets, and biodiversity offsetting in particular, are the mechanism, it would generate large sums of private sec- most rapidly advancing of these instruments. They are tor funding from industries that profit from continued fossil increasingly linked with compensation trust funds and bio- fuel extraction and use. The money generated through diversity banks as implementing mechanisms.2 selling carbon credits (see chapter 1) was to be used to help end deforestation and finance forest conservation. Chapter 1 discusses key assumptions behind biodiver- sity offsetting and shows why offsetting leads to more, not In reality, conflicts abound,3 REDD+finance remains less, environmental destruction, and often amounts to a largely public sector funding for private sector enterprises double land grab where corporations control land use at and international consultants,4 and large-scale deforesta- two locations — the site of the corporate destruction and tion continues at alarming rates.5 Rather than ending the the location the company now claims as biodiversity offset. disastrous experiment, however, REDD+ is now increas- ingly presented as ‘payment-for-performance’ mecha- Chapter 2 outlines different ways in which biodiversity nism. Yet, its core architecture remains that of an offset offsetting or similar compensation offset schemes are mechanism. embedded in environmental regulations in different coun- tries, and the different mechanisms that companies can Chapter 4 looks at how the global food, agriculture and use to fulfil offsetting requirements. aviation industries are using biodiversity and carbon off- setting to maintain social license to continue their destruc- Chapter 3 examines how offsetting enables continued tive activities and ward off the threat of regulation destruction, particularly in areas of special importance to biodiversity. It looks at how Performance Standard 6 of the A final section reflects on emerging trends in the field of World Bank’s International Finance Corporation is driving biodiversity offsetting. i. REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation of Forests. The ‘plus’ indicates that activities involving forest conservation, forestry management and tree planting also qualify for REDD+ payments. 4 | REGULATED DESTRUCTION What is biodiversity offsetting? 6 1 Advocates of biodiversity offsetting claim that the instru- ment ensures corporations causing damage to biodiversity compensate for their impact by maintaining or improving biodiversity on another site. It is one of a range of financialization of nature instruments that proponents of market-based environmentalism and ‘green growth’ claim will enable nature to flourish while destructive corporate activities continue. They emphasize their expectation that the financialization of nature will help create new environmental assets — biodiversity-rich properties or land with high water filtration or carbon stor- age capacities — that can be rented out for compensa- tion. These assets, they promise, will one day become profitable investments. They also emphasize that a shift from regulation focused on limits, targets and restrictions on destruction or pollution to ‘flexible’ regulation based on compensation will relieve the state of the increasing costs of environmental protection and restoration. In essence, biodiversity Above all, corporate demand for ‘regulatory relief’ and offsetting and similar World Bank standards that weaken environmental protec- tion are driving the growing popularity of biodiversity off- compensation offset setting and compensation offset schemes more generally. schemes allow more pollution Offsetting schemes provide ‘regulatory flexibility’. Looked at from a different perspective, they undermine environ- and destruction today on mental protection, by giving companies an opportunity to the promise to restore or ignore pollution limits or nature protection rules at any par- ticular place of interest to them, while claiming that they prevent planned destruction are respecting environmental protection laws. Offsetting allows government agencies and financial institutions to elsewhere, in future maintain a dependable flow of environmental licenses and financing for corporate destruction despite the growing catalogue of environmental regulation that has evolved in response to public pressure for better environmental pro- tection since the 1970s. REGULATED DESTRUCTION | 5 To understand how offsetting schemes provide this reg- ulatory flexibility, it is important to recall what offsets are. Offsetting is based on the assumption that the ecological damage caused in one place can be cancelled out — off- set — by restoring or protecting biodiversity claimed to be at risk elsewhere. This assumption allows a company to exceed a pollution limit or circumvent a prohibition to destroy at any one particular place it wants for corporate profit-making. The only requirement: presenting a plan to authorities and financiers outlining how this damage that is over and above a legal limit or regulatory restriction will be cancelled out through avoiding planned destruc- tion or pollution elsewhere. This prevention of supposedly planned destruction elsewhere, or the promise for resto- ration of a ‘degraded’ habitat that otherwise would remain ‘degraded’, it is claimed, will cancel out the ecological damage at the site of corporate pollution or destruction. In essence, biodiversity offsetting and similar compen- sation offset schemes allow more pollution and destruc- tion today on the promise to restore or prevent planned destruction elsewhere, in future. Offsetting leads to more, not less ecological destruction, causes more pollution, and amounts to a double land grab because corporations end up controlling land use at two locations – the site they are destroying and the location they are claiming as offset.