Photo: Mikael Risedal
Researchers from Sweden, Germany, Brazil and the USA have developed a financial mechanism to support the protection of the world’s natural heritage.
In a recent study, they developed three different design options for an intergovernmental biodiversity financing mechanism. Asking what would happen if money was given to countries for providing protected areas, they simulated where the money would flow, what type of incentives this would create – and how these incentives would align with international conservation goals.
After long negotiations, the international community has agreed to safeguard the global ecosystems and improve on the status of biodiversity. The global conservation goals for 2020, called the Aichi targets, are an ambitious hallmark. Yet, effective implementation is largely lacking. Biodiversity is still dwindling at rates only comparable to the last planetary mass extinction. Additional effort is required to reach the Aichi targets and even more so to halt biodiversity loss.
“Human well-being depends on ecological life support. Yet, we are constantly losing biodiversity and therefore the resilience of ecosystems. At the international level, there are political goals, but the implementation of conservation policies is a national task. There is no global financial mechanism that can help nations to reach their biodiversity targets”, says lead author Nils Droste from Lund University, Sweden.
Brazil has successfully implemented Ecological Fiscal Transfer systems that compensate municipalities for hosting protected areas at a local level since the early 1990’s. According to previous findings, such mechanisms help to create additional protected areas. The international research team has therefore set out to scale this idea up to the global level where not municipalities but nations are in charge of designating protected areas. They developed and compared three different design options:
An ecocentric model: where only protected area extent per country counts – the bigger the protected area, the better;
A socio-ecological model: where protected areas and Human Development Index count, adding development justice to the previous model;
An anthropocentric model: where population density is also considered, as people benefit locally from protected areas.
The socio-ecological design was the one that proved to be the most efficient. The model provided the highest marginal incentives – that is, the most additional money for protecting an additional percent of a country’s area – for countries that are the farthest from reaching the global conservation goals. The result surprised the researchers.
“While we developed the socio-ecological design with a fairness element in mind, believing that developing countries might be more easily convinced by a design that benefits them, we were surprised how well this particular design aligns with the global policy goals”, says Nils Droste. “It would most strongly incentivize additional conservation action where the global community is lacking it the most”, he adds.
As the study was aimed at providing options, not prescriptions for policy makers, the study did not detail who should be paying or how large the fund should exactly be. Rather, it provides a yet unexplored option to develop a financial mechanism for biodiversity conservation akin to what the Green Climate Fund is for climate change.
“We know that we need to change land use in order to preserve biodiversity. Protecting land from degradation and providing healthy ecosystems, clean air or clean rivers is a function of the state. Giving a financial reward to governments for such public ecosystem services will ease the provision of corresponding conservation efforts and will help to put this on the agenda”, concludes Nils Droste.
Learn more: What if we paid countries to protect biodiversity?
The Latest on: Biodiversity
via Google News
The Latest on: Biodiversity
- Materials Processing Institute plants orchard as part of long term plans to improve campus biodiversityon May 17, 2022 at 3:50 am
The Materials Processing Institute has planted an orchard as part of long-term plans to improve the biodiversity of its extensive grounds. Part of an initiative to reverse the rapid national decline ...
- Ruacana to host 2022 Biodiversity Action Day celebrationon May 17, 2022 at 3:31 am
NAMIBIA will mark this year's International Day for Biological Diversity at the town of Ruacana in the Omusati region.
- Wind giant and rewilding expert to pioneer North Sea marine biodiversity projecton May 17, 2022 at 2:19 am
Sponsored content: Ørsted and ARK Nature are joining forces to pioneer marine rewilding and test its potential to restore vital ocean biodiversity ...
- DENR order sets biodiversity protection measures in mining operationson May 17, 2022 at 1:14 am
MANILA, Philippines — The Department of Environment and Natural Resources issued an order providing measures to protect and conserve terrestrial and marine biodiversity in all stages of mining ...
- What happened at the biodiversity COP, and why it matters to businesson May 17, 2022 at 12:40 am
An ambitious and implementable international agreement on nature will help set the direction for corporate action.
- Massive carbon emissions reduce biodiversity 300 mln years ago: studyon May 16, 2022 at 11:58 pm
How might global warming put our planet in jeopardy in the near future? A research group examined the situation 300 mln years ago and revealed a scenario with ...
- Why should biodiversity be part of the ESG mix?on May 16, 2022 at 5:01 pm
To date, the “E” in ESG has been dominated by climate change. Biodiversity, another aspect of the environment, has been called the missing piece of the ESG puzzle. Broadly, biodiversity refers to the ...
- Arcadia Fund supports Plazi in its endeavor to rediscover known biodiversityon May 16, 2022 at 9:00 am
The Swiss-based Plazi NGO has received a grant of EUR 1.5 million from Arcadia Fund – a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin – to further develop its Biodiversity Literature Repository ...
- Policy Watch: Why we need a joined-up approach to tackling biodiversity loss, desertification and climate changeon May 16, 2022 at 6:40 am
Many organisations are warning that the overlapping crises of climate, biodiversity and land degradation must be tackled together – not sequentially – if planet Earth is to continue to support us. The ...
- Global food trade research upends assumptions about how biodiversity fareson May 12, 2022 at 8:00 am
In this week's Nature Food, Michigan State University (MSU) researchers find that imports from high-income countries benefit biodiversity in low-income countries. Two MSU sustainability scholars ...
via Bing News