The Frankfurt Declaration on biodiversity promotes protecting 30% of the earth, “Nature-Positive”, and offsetting. To make matters worse, it excludes Indigenous Peoples

Yesterday, REDD-Monitor wrote about an excellent NGO statement opposing the target of protecting 30% of the planet (30×30). The target is to be discussed at the meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity next week in Montreal. The statement makes a clear argument about why the 30×30 target would be a disaster for Indigenous Peoples and for biodiversity.

Today, let’s take a look at a statement from some of the proponents of the 30×30 target: The Frankfurt Declaration. Organisations behind the Declaration include the three Leibniz Natural History Museums, the Frankfurt Zoological Society, ESMT (an international business school), and the Wyss Campaign for Nature.

Like the NGO statement, the Frankfurt Declaration makes clear arguments about why the 30×30 target would be a disaster for Indigenous Peoples and for biodiversity. But unlike the NGO statement, it does so accidentally.

A Paris Agreement for biodiversity?

The Declaration’s proponents argue that an agreement like the Paris Agreement, the 2015 UN climate deal, is needed for biodiversity.

It’s a completely weird comparison. The Paris Agreement is not ambitious. It is a disaster. As climate scientist James Hansen pointed out at the time,

“It’s a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2°C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises.”

The words “fossil fuels” didn’t even appear in the Paris Agreement and the past seven years have shown Hansen to be correct. The UN climate negotiations have utterly failed to address the climate crisis.

Yet, in a statement about the Frankfurt Declaration, Prof. Jörg Rocholl, president of the ESMT business school asks, “How can we put a price on biodiversity loss, the way we already do on CO₂ emissions?”

It’s as if Rocholl believes that the climate crisis has been solved by putting a price on CO₂ emissions. The reality, of course, is that the climate crisis is getting rapidly worse. Floods in Pakistan, droughts in Kenya, forest fires in the Amazon and elsewhere, melting ice in Greenland, dying coral reefs, drying rivers, and rising sea levels, to mention just some of the recent impacts of the climate crisis.

Is this really what we want for biodiversity?

Nature positive

The Frankfurt Declaration pushes for “nature-positive corporate action”. The phrase “Nature-positive” appears 10 times in the Declaration.

“If we do not effect a fundamental change towards a nature-positive economy now, the Anthropocene – the Age of Humans – will become the shortest epoch in the history of the Earth!” says Klement Tockner of the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research.

But recently, 119 experts from academia and civil society signed on to an open letter rejecting the so-called “nature positive economy”. The letter points out that,

In reality, most valuation models only value a few main ecological functions and ignore the rest as well as their interdependences. Comprehensive modelling would require a complete scientific knowledge that we do not possess and would be too complicated and too costly. It has also been documented that the monetary valuation methodologies being used are weak and vulnerable to many biases, and provide at best lower bounds of monetary values. As a result, the monetary values being produced do not represent the value of nature’s ecological functions, not even a proxy. Yet misleading figures are not better than nothing but worse than nothing, as they can lead to wrong policy decisions with irreversible consequences.

The nature positive agenda also promotes biodiversity offsetting. Here there is a clear parallel with the way the UN has failed to address the climate crisis, through the promotion of false solutions like carbon trading. The creation of a market for nature would be as disastrous for biodiversity as carbon trading has been for the climate.

WWF has put forward a proposal for a nature positive economy roadmap that tells us that “well-governed nature markets” are needed as part of a nature positive economy. And there is a Taskforce on Nature Markets – which sounds a lot like Mark Carney’s Taskforce on Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets.

The letter rejecting Nature Positive describes the Taskforce on Nature Markets as “a newly created lobby group that promotes nature markets that ‘deliver nature positive outcomes’ such as intrinsic markets, offset markets and derivatives markets on nature.”

Whose biodiversity is it, anyway?

The Frankfurt Declaration is illustrated on the Frankfurt Zoological Society with a photograph of an exhibition in the Senckenberg Natural History Museum. All of the biodiversity in the exhibition is stone dead. A better metaphor for the failure to address both the climate and the biodiversity crisis is difficult to imagine.

The Frankfurt Declaration argues that, “A binding global agreement of historic proportions is needed to protect nature. It must create the framework for stopping the loss of biological diversity, preserving intact natural areas, managing them sustainably and restoring destroyed habitats.”

What the Frankfurt Declaration does not mention is where this biodiversity is. Here’s an extract from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs’ website:

indigenous peoples are stewards of the world’s biodiversity and cultural diversity. Although they account for only around 5 percent of the world’s population, they effectively manage an estimated 20-25 per cent of the Earth’s land surface. This land coincides with areas that hold 80 per cent of the planet’s biodiversity and about 40 per cent of all terrestrial protected areas and ecologically intact landscapes. Indigenous peoples therefore play a key role in efforts to protect the planet and biodiversity.

Yet neither the Frankfurt Declaration nor the statement about the Declaration makes any mention of Indigenous Peoples. I pointed this omission out to the Franfurt Zoological Society. Here’s their response, in full:

Yet the Frankfurt Zoological Society had the audacity to headline its statement announcing the Frankfurt Declaration: “Together for Biological Diversity”!

30×30

The Frankfurt Declaration includes the following demand to politicians:

Approval of the “30×30” target (protection of at least 30 percent of the land and sea area by 2030) as well as ambitious nature restoration targets. The focus for both goals, which must be decided at COP15, should be on the ecosystems that are most important for biodiversity and climate protection. It is also essential to implement the 30×30 goal in a verifiable manner. As recognised, nature-based solutions, these goals offer in many cases the opportunity for companies to invest in “carbon offset” programs and thus contribute to the implementation of both goals. In order to prevent “greenwashing”, globally uniform, binding and scientifically based minimum standards are necessary.

This could not be clearer. While Indigenous Peoples are excluded from the Frankfurt Declaration, Big Polluters will be allowed to benefit from Indigenous Peoples’ territories by using Indigenous Peoples’ biodiversity to offset their continued pollution.

Governments, corporations and the conservation industry are colluding in what will constitute the biggest land grab in history. The organisations signing on to the Frankfurt Declaration are complicit in this neo-colonial land grab.

 

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PHOTO Credit: Senckenberg Natural History Museum, Frankfurt