The previous half of this article detailed the history behind the Convention on Biological Diversity, (CBD) - first signed into law in 1992. Whilst some hail it as a landmark in environmental policy, others see it as a failure, with many of its goals left unmet more than 3 decades after its launch.
But why has it failed? In this opinion piece, I discuss the problems I personally believe exist with the CBD as it stands, and how we need to move forward for an ecologically harmonious future.
The Design
Since the CBD came into force, there have been some small positives. As of 2024, 99% of parties to the Convention have set out a national action plan for conserving biodiversity. The rate of deforestation has declined by a third and financial resources available for biodiversity conservation through development aid and international flows have doubled since the 2010 Aichi convention. But these are sticking plasters for a problem which has already seen devastating worldwide ramifications which are sure to worsen in the coming decades, and seem trivial when compared to the way in which things have gotten worse since the UNFCC and CBD were implemented.
Andreas Malm writes of the first COP on the UNFCC, held in 1995: “Since then, total annual CO2 emissions have grown by some 60 per cent… In the twenty-five years after the delegates left, more carbon was released from underground stocks than in the seventy-five years before they met.” Despite much fanfare and the ritual of annual (for the UNFCC) and bi-annual (for the CBD) Conferences of the Parties, these two treaties have failed to address the simultaneous crises of climate change and biodiversity loss, largely because they made no attempt at systematic change.
What kind of systematic change? For one thing, addressing runaway capitalism. After the Rio Summit, globalisation continued to occur, at faster rates than ever before. Trade liberalisation has, for the most part, operated independently of progress on social and environmental issues and therefore several countries have merely ‘outsourced’ their environmental harm by importing goods from pollution havens. Natarajan and Dehm write of the prospect of a “more equal world that prioritises environmental stability over short-term economic gain,” but in the mean-time, we remain forever “trapped in the seemingly inescapable orbit of globalised capitalism and the myths of progress.”
Both the UNFCC and the CBD are built on promises that look good on paper but lack a methodology towards achieving them, or a strict obligation to do so. The CBD was conceived as a “framework convention” and so the methods of achieving its objectives are up to the individual nations signed up to it. The only strict law placed upon these nations is that they must submit national reports on their progress in meeting these objectives. Legal analysis of the CBD’s framework highlights imprecise language in its provisions (eg. “should” and “as far as possible” and “as appropriate”) which dilutes the actual obligations placed on its signatories - “voluntary, vague or aspirational, rather than required.”
The political set-up
Since there is no incentive for governments to do so, they consistently fail to implement policy which would help them achieve CBD objectives. Whilst blame lies in the design of the CBD, this has also been ascribed to the tendency of politicians to ignore long-term strategy in fear of short-term electoral costs.
A survey by Pew Research Center in 2007 found that countries in the Global South expressed more concern over environmental issues than their counterparts - with less than half of US and UK survey-takers concurring that global warming was a “very serious” problem, as opposed to, for example, Brazil, Bangladesh and Venezuela (88%, 85% and 78% respectively). Most countries surveyed agreed that the US had the largest share of the blame with regards to the environment, and therefore should shoulder the highest burden of responsibility.
The US, however, demonstrates a reluctance and even hostility towards environmental action. When policy priorities were assessed amongst the US public in 2015, only 51% of respondents listed the environment as a top priority, as opposed to the 76% who listed terrorism, the top-ranking policy. This was also extremely partisan, with 54% of Democrats citing it as a priority, but only 15% of Republicans.
Research suggests that public opinion is often shaped by public policy. It is absolutely undeniable that the interests of corporations have had a stranglehold over US environmental policy. It is estimated that between 2000 and 2016, roughly $2 billion was spent in the US on lobbying around climate issues, and in 2023 alone, the oil and gas industry poured £127.8 million into US lobbying.
The Waxman-Markey bill, described as the “most promising and prominent US climate regulation so far” failed to pass in the Senate in 2010, after firms like Boeing, Marathon Oil, Ford and Walmart spent exorbitant amounts of money on lobbying efforts. In the UK, fossil fuel companies met with the UK government 210 times in the year following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, resulting in legislation that essentially meant tax breaks for fossil fuel firms during the UK cost-of-living crisis.
In many countries, direct corruption is also a factor. For example, in Papua New Guinea - where forest ecosystems are home to some of the rarest organisms in the world - the government has allowed rampant, illegal logging - mostly conducted by foreign conglomerates - en masse for decades. The vast majority of timber logged in Papua New Guinea - up to 70% of which may be illegal - goes to manufacturing hubs in China, and then onwards as finished product to countries in the Global North. The local police are paid by logging companies to not only look the other way on the illegal deforestation, but to suppress resistance from local activists.
Conflicting Conservation Ideologies
One of the key themes of the CBD is “sustainable use” of the components of biodiversity. The guide to the CBD even states that “biological resources are the pillars upon which we build civilisations.” This framing suggests that conservation is important specifically so that humans can continue resource extraction for decades to come, to a more ‘sustainable’ limit - in other words, “natural resources are governed with the goal of enabling efficient exploitation.”
What really is “sustainable development?” As Berkhout, Leach and Scoones suggest in their book ‘Negotiating Environmental Change,’ the rising environmental consciousness of the 70s, 80s and 90s coincided with increased liberalisation and market deregulation, and this shift to globalised neoliberalism meant environmentalism increasingly came to be viewed through this type of framework.
The environment became quantifiable - economists rushed to assign value to ecosystem services - “business as usual, only greener.” This became the “new conservation” of the 21st century: the use of market-based tools and partnerships with corporations to protect biodiversity, specifically because of the ways in which it serves humans. Heynens and Robbins refer to this valuation as “the process through which invaluable and complex ecosystems are reduced to commodities through pricing.”
Traditional conservationists see nature as having an intrinsic value that should be protected regardless of the economic value of each of its components, whilst new conservationists argue that uniqueness and scarcity under a market system increases the value of a particular species, and therefore makes it more likely to be protected.
The theory behind this new conservationist ideology can be illustrated by an example: if there are only a handful left of a rare species of elephant hunted for the ivory in its tusks, the price fetched by that ivory will be high, and local communities will work to protect it. However, if the elephant is conserved and of no use to the villagers, they will see the elephants as a nuisance (because of the destruction of crops, the danger posed to humans etc.) and take no efforts to save it.
Other proponents of new conservation argue that it forges a path away from ‘fortress conservation’ - a problematic traditional method of conservation where states or NGOs take ownership of protected landscapes, often displacing indigenous communities in the process.
The best known example of fortress conservation is the creation of Yellowstone National Park in the US. The park was established in 1872, a process during which 26 indigenous groups were forcibly removed from their land, which the government claimed was to protect it from exploitation. For the tribes, this meant separation from their ancestral lands, places they considered sacred and that they depended on for food and shelter. Other US parks like Yosemite and Glacier National Park share similar stories of coerced eviction of Native American peoples.
Although perhaps slowly and begrudgingly, modern conservation is making a shift away from fortress conservation in recognition of the human rights violations it incurs. In Yellowstone, for example, there have been efforts to ‘re-indigenise’ the park by permitting the hunting of bison by Native Americans again, which has the benefit of controlling bison numbers which prevents overgrazing of the park. One of the key tenets of indigenous activism is fighting to restore lost lands such as these to the tribes who once lived there, so that they are able to manage them sustainably themselves. A lot of this lost land was stolen by conservationists - in 2009, journalist Mark Dowie estimated up to half the land selected globally for conservation purposes over the last century was initially occupied by indigenous peoples. In his words, “tribal peoples view conservationists as just another coloniser.”
New conservationists like The Breakthrough Institute, for example, use these histories to argue against “scolding capitalism,” in the belief that the partnership of the environmental movement with corporations and the furthered pursuit of economic growth will bring development to the global poor. Others like The Nature Conservancy work with partners like BP, Dow and Rio Tinto in attempts to minimise harm by averting development on particularly biodiverse lands.
But many market-based solutions to biodiversity loss have come under scrutiny in recent years. For example, an investigation by The Guardian suggested that over 90% of carbon credits - “offset” forests employed by businesses such as fossil fuel producers to make them ostensibly carbon neutral - issued by Verra, the biggest carbon accreditation company, may be worthless.
Furthermore, the purported “human” side of new conservation should come under scrutiny too, with claims that new conservation benefits the groups often marginalised by traditional conservation over-exaggerated. The elephant example from earlier is contingent on the idea that the community surrounded by elephants with precious ivory will profit from the ivory themselves. As Fairhead, Scoones and Leach put it: “local beneficiaries [receive] often vanishingly small benefits from newly commoditised, traded nature.” The majority of poached animals in Africa are trafficked to countries like China and the US, and low-level poachers make a very small percentage of the money associated with wildlife trade.
Modern economic theory has been built around “Kuznets curve” - the idea that as nations ‘develop’ economically (i.e. become richer) they hit an initial phase of increased income inequality before ‘equalising.’ Kuznet had no empirical evidence for his theory, and attempts to prove it have been inconclusive - and yet his ideology is preached by new conservationists as a silver bullet to fix both the poverty and biodiversity crises faced by the Global South - growth for a sustainable and equal future, even as leading economic theorists cry out for the exact opposite.
Rather than the vision new conservationists construct - of the ‘sustainable use’ of nature with everyone getting a slice of the pie - we are increasingly finding ourselves with increased economic growth purely for the sake of concentrating wealth in the hands of the few.
A shift towards an anti-racist, compassionate conservation does not have to come with the neoliberalisation of nature. Analysis of the ideology of over 9000 people working in the conservation sector found that while there is broad support for people-led conservation, support for the integration of capitalism and corporatism into conservation is more contentious.
This elicits the possibility of a ‘new’ new conservation - one which is still people-led, but abandons the consumerist elements of the ‘new’ conservation which came before it.
A ‘new’ new conservation is urgently necessary. Both traditional and new conservation treat nature as something “to be disciplined and regulated, harnessed to the imperative of imperial development,” as William Adams puts it. Both are evidently failing, no matter how much stock the CBD puts in “sustainable development.” It is time to forge a new path - or we risk an ‘ecological meltdown,’ the deaths of millions of species, and a planet hostile to life.
Moving forward
As EJ Milner-Gulland writes: “global conservation is still overwhelmingly dominated by the same privileged white, wealthy Northern hemisphere voices.” Changing the field of conservation requires amplifying the voices of those with the greatest dependency on it: the global poor, indigenous communities, disabled people, people of colour. But tokenistic representation is insufficient: conservation needs a complete ideological overhaul.
To start, we need to re-characterise human-nature relations. Instead of seeing human interaction with the environment as inherently problematic - and humans as intrinsically selfish and exploitative, or conversely, nature as a free-flowing tap existing for human benefit, we need to start fostering a reciprocal relationship with the world around us. Here, I would recommend Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer for a guide to undoing both narratives and forging a new, mutualistic relationship with the environment.
Secondly, the conservation movement needs to get serious about land justice, not just because of the environmental benefits it will bring but because it is a moral imperative in a world where millions of people have been forcibly dispossessed from their ancestral lands, and where dispossession is still occurring. We need to, as Fairhead, Scoones and Leach put it: “wrest nature from control by market logics.” This means dismantling the ‘gridded’ version of the Earth - where every part and parcel is human-owned - and “setting Earth free to be an expansive, untamed and exuberant mandala of life.”
Rewilding is certainly an essential step in this process of freeing land from human domination, but it needs to work in partnership with (not in spite of) indigenous communities, and see humans as part of, rather than separate to, the wild - as above.
Rethinking land use also means rethinking agriculture - right now, the predominant methods of food production are an ecological nightmare, as well as a threat to the livelihoods of peasant farmers around the globe. Farmer’s movements such as the KRRS are lighting the way for an agroecological and socially just transition.
This brings me nicely to my final suggestion, which is that conservationists need to unite with other liberatory movements such as anti-imperialist, anti-racist, feminist and worker’s movements. As Val Plumwood asserts in Decolonising Conservation, the othering of non-human life comes jointly with the oppression of marginalised people as perceived objects of rule. Currently, these movements are often fragmented and disharmonious, despite having shared enemies and goals. Conservation should no longer be the idle promises of politicians and corporations, but a global justice movement - only then can we achieve results.
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