by Valentina Figuera MartĂnez (Global Forest Coalition, GFC)
As global leaders continue COP17 negotiations, it is difficult to ignore how women’s oppression is deeply intertwined with the exploitation of ecosystems. After almost two decades of pledges, biodiversity action remains
underfunded, forest loss continues to be a growing threat, socio-ecological transitions are a low priority, and ecosystems are spiraling toward collapse.
But we should also ask a more basic question: What can we learn from the people who are already protecting biodiversity in their territories?
After hearing over the last several months from communities from the Global South about human rights vio-lations and ecosystem destruction they confront, it is important to remind everyone of an incontrovertible fact: As long as parties fail to address the systemic drivers of biodiversity destruction - especially in the Global South - and continue using domestic policies to expand extrac-tivist sectors while broadening status quo dependency, these failures will persist.
One of the most contentious topics is biodiversity finance. Biodiversity offsets and credits, debt-for-nature swaps, and nature-based solutions are just some of the flawed market-based instruments presented to mobilize finance toward Global South countries, mainly through private finance. Despite all the widely known controversies, poor performance and human rights abuses, they are increasingly dominating attention while urgent priorities - including allocation of direct resources for community-led conservation actions and giving communities full decision-making power in finance institutional structures - remain unaddressed.
Market-based schemes should be ruled out. They instrumentalize greenwashing and allow brokers, developers, intermediaries and large NGOs to extract funding that should be benefiting communities.
Women and youth are making a difference
Real solutions to the biodiversity and climate crises may be an ancestral farming system rooted in traditional knowledge, or a community defending its territory from extractivist industries. They may be women organizing to protect forests, strengthen food sovereignty, or build more equitable forms of community autonomy.
All these community-led initiatives remind us that the value of ancestral knowledge, community autonomy, and access to decision-making power cannot be replaced by money or “innovative schemes.” Real community-led solutions cannot be separated from the political dimensions of life and stay only on the technocratic side, focu-sing on reformist approaches to delay urgent systemic changes. They cannot be “scaled up” like the top-down generic schemes presented in negotiations.
Real women-led solutions are unique, as every complex ecosystem is, and demand putting power in the hands of environmental defenders. The Gender-Just Real Solutions Map for Territories and Communities, an interactive collaborative mapping tool co-designed with global grassroots organizations and NGOs, is a learning path to find answers to a complex crisis. One thing is clear: We must support localized actions which are genuinely community-led solutions that uphold rights, autonomy, socio-ecological transitions and create conditions to fight social inequalities.
The question for COP17 is not whether these solutions exist. They do.
The question is whether parties are prepared to recognize them, resource them, and most importantly, listen to the people who are already putting them into practice.