Market-oriented instruments for biodiversity finance: facilitate biodiversity destruction

Mirna Fernandez (Third World Network) - At COP17 many of the discussions focused on ways to close the biodiversity finance gap, an estimated USD 700 billion annual shortfall in the resources needed to protect and restore nature. To close this finance gap, target 19 of the GBF aims to mobilise a total of USD 200 billion per year for biodiversity, and highlights the 
importance of ‘innovative finance schemes’, such as Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES), green bonds and biodiversity offsets and credits.

Assess pollution as biodiversity experiences it

Julie Sohier (POLLINIS) - Chemical assessments divide pollution into substances, uses and exposure scenarios. Living organisms encounter none of these divisions. They experience cross-contamination across landscapes and throughout their entire life cycle, alongside other pressures. Biodiversity protection can fail in the distance between these two realities.

Beyond the Negotiating Table: Whose Voices Are Being Heard at COP17?

Vince Cinches (World Animal Protection) - One and a half week into COP17 in Yerevan, one thing stands out: what happens outside the negotiating rooms matters just as much as what happens inside them. By the time country delegations arrive at COP, priorities have been identified, positions developed and negotia-ting instructions agreed. 

Artificial Intelligence & datacenters: another threat to nature

by Ana Di Pangracio (FARN) & Antje Lorch (Ecoropa) - AI is destroying biodiversity through its datacenters: through their water, energy and land use, their greenhouse gas emissions, their increase of local temperatures; their demand for critical minerals and the electronic waste they are producing. Their extraction and processing can contribute to biodiversity loss, ecosystem degradation, pollution and violations of human rights, particularly in countries of the Global South.