By Julia Martin-Ortega, Ruth Bookbinder, and Joshua Cohen
This Plain Language Summary is published in advance of the paper discussed. Please check back soon for a link to the full paper.
Most funding for nature recovery comes from public sources. Increasingly, policy makers, conservationists and some academics claim that to achieve climate and nature targets, there is need for private investments. Supporters argue for private investment so strongly, and have developed many initiatives, that calls for private investments (or green finance) are starting to resemble a gold rush. In this rush, however, some are ignoring major risks: those associated with treating nature like a tradable commodity (for example, in the form of carbon and biodiversity markets). These are risks that are well known in some academic fields and include concerns over enhancing inequalities and restricting access to nature, favouring selling carbon credits over avoiding damage, or diminishing interest in conservation if it cannot generate profits.
In this research, we review the UK government’s green finance strategy and confirm that, indeed, it ignores the risks of nature commodification. We found that the strategy overwhelmingly frames risks in terms of how they affect investors or the market, but not how commodification risks our relationship with nature. Overall, there seems to be an implicit narrative in favour of commodification. Considering that carbon and biodiversity markets are not making significant progress in terms of environmental improvements and that calls for green finance are not being very successful in actually raising funds, we wonder if we are not risking too much (this is: the foundations of our relationship with nature) for too little gain.
We argue that we need to dedicate efforts to opening-up new imaginaries and to experiment with and cultivate radically different ways of relating to nature. We suggest that those ways could be based in re-establishing kinship with nature, rather than treating nature as commodity
Relational Thinking 