ECO 70(4) - Thursday, 24 October

TNFD is NOT aligned with the GBF

Shona Hawkes, Rainforest Action Network -- The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) is heavily promoted at COP16. The taskforce is made up solely of 40 corporations. It has no scientists, government officials, Indigenous peoples, CSOs or academics. TNFD’s reporting framework is not ‘aligned’ with the GBF. GBF Target 15(a) calls for businesses to ‘transparently disclose’, including their ‘impacts’. The TNFD’s recommended baseline is to report how biodiversity impacts a business. It is not that a business should report its impacts on nature. ...

Biodiversity and energy transition: running counter to the GBF

Maria Laura Castillo, High Andean Wetlands Program at FARN -- The narratives of the Global North's energy transition model promote lithium mining as a solution to the climate change crisis, based on the use of this mineral in batteries for renewable energy storage. However, the greatest demand for lithium comes from the car industry, to power individual electric vehicle batteries. Today, the geopolitical race for control of the supply chain of minerals for such transition increases the pressure on the countries that possess them, and is jeopardizing the integrity of the ecosystems in which they are found, their associated biodiversity, and favoring dynamics of human rights violations. ...

Debt for nature swaps: proceed with caution (and low expectations)

Patrick Bigger, Climate and Community Institute -- The concept of a debt for nature swap is straightforward. Countries carrying heavy debt burdens generally have little public fiscal space to invest in critical priorities, from education, to healthcare, to environmental protection. Worse, the need to make debt payments denominated in global reserve currencies like US Dollars puts pressure on these governments to accelerate destructive economic practices like export-oriented agriculture, mining, or gas development. Debt swaps aim to alleviate these pressures by offering some level of debt relief in return for commitments to devote freed up financial resources toward achieving environmental objectives. ...

The need to recognise Afro-descendant coummunities in the CBD

Friends of the Earth Colombia, Brasil and International -- In Latin America, Afro-descendant communities play an important role in the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity. Thanks to these communities, forests and territories, cultures and knowledge have been conserved. This recognition can be seen as an evolution that also entails the recognition, reparation, respect, implementation and defence of their rights. At first and thanks to their struggles, Indigenous Peoples have obtained a status at the international level. Peasant communities managed to obtain a declaration recognising their rights after years of intense work at the United Nations (which should also be reflected in the CBD). Afro-descendant communities have made similar achievements in some countries and their emancipatory struggles in the face of the dehumanisation of colonialism and the enslavement of the peoples of the African continent are historic in Latin America and the Caribbean. ...