Green economy

Last week, WDM climate campaigner Sarah Reader donned a Nick Clegg mask and interrupted the deputy prime minister’s speech to the ‘natural capital summit’ on the sidelines of Rio+20.

Clegg was there to support to the ‘natural capital declaration’, a document drawn up by 37 big financial sector companies to call for the financial valuation of nature and the internalisation of environmental ‘externalities’ (i.e. bringing them into the market).

It seems that Sarah has raised some hackles at the World Bank. On Thursday, the World Bank’s vice president for sustainable development, Rachel Kyte, posted a blog criticising WDM for ‘missing the point’ about valuing nature:

The event had its share of unexpected excitement when a protester, wearing a Clegg mask, interrupted the UK deputy prime minister. She was from World Development Movement. Reading their blog later, I think they are missing the point. We are not talking about "pricing" nature but "valuing" it. By valuing it, you are enabling better economic decisions. For example, if you're a water-scarce country and you...

Guest blog post by Oscar Reyes, writer and activist on climate and energy finance, and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies

Given how backwards the Rio Summit’s priorities were, it's hardly surprising that negotiations ended before they began. But a slow swarm of black ministerial limousines has crawled across Rio regardless, with Ministers, Presidents and Prime Ministers queuing up to talk the language of sustainability, while mostly advancing corporate interests. It came to a close yesterday with the adoption of a final  declaration called, without hint of irony, "The Future We Want."
The Rio declaration contains 283 paragraphs of blank prose that "reaffirms," "notes," and "acknowledges" a long shopping list of activities, but "commits" to virtually nothing. There is no program of action, figures, dates, targets, nothing at all that locks countries into taking action. It is a political non-event that turgidly regurgitates some of the sustainability-speak of the original Rio conference 20 years ago, with none of its ambition.

Despite that, there are a few straws for optimists to clutch at. The most significant-sounding, from an...

On the final day of the Rio+20 summit, the World Development Movement has slammed the lack of commitment from rich industrialised countries in the Rio+20 agreement, and has condemned the UK government’s use of the summit to push for the privatisation of nature. 

Kirsty Wright, campaigner at the World Development Movement, said:

Rio+20 has produced a pathetically unambitious document devoid of solid commitments and packed with diplomatic fudges and ambiguous language. This will do nothing to solve the multiple crises we face.

The UK government, ignoring developing countries’ solid opposition to its plans to put a financial value on nature, has used the summit to push forward its ‘great nature sale’, which would see control of resources like water and biodiversity taken from the people who depend on them, and handed over to multinational companies.

Role of the UK government 

Kirsty Wright said:

The UK government has used the Rio+20 summit as a smokescreen for pushing forward the interests of bankers and multinational corporations. As we steamroll towards environmental destruction and ever growing gap between rich and poor, the UK and its allies are championing the same broken...

The era of free water is over.

Or at least, it will be if the 45 multinational companies which signed a communiqué at Rio+20 get their way. 

The companies – which include Coca Cola, Nestle and Glaxo Smith Kline – are pushing for a "fair and appropriate price" to be placed on water to end the current 'free for all'.

"Those who can afford water should pay… Companies like certainty and in areas where there is no pricing they are very vulnerable. It could potentially push up prices in some markets but better to pay more and have certainty of supply," a UN official overseeing the initiative told the Guardian.

But what about those who will be priced out? And what about the inevitable rises in food prices that will follow?

In a world in which 1.2 billion people live in conditions of water scarcity and climate change is meaning more drought across the world, the corporate solution is to slap a price on what is left to ensure there’s plenty of water to make Coke.

Last year, Willem Buiter, chief economist at Citigroup, talked about the great business opportunities in the creation of global markets in water as a commodity. He said this could happen in 25-30 years time. But now, it appears that a number of companies want to move towards...

Ebay seller “Rio_Summit_Nature_Sale” today listed some of the world’s most famous forests, oceans, lakes and species for sale on ebay. 

The sale was timed to coincide with a “Natural Capital Dialogue” being held today at Rio+20  by the World Bank and the UK government. The meeting will promote initiatives that put a price on ecosystems and allow new commodities to be created, as part of a “green economy” agenda that has drawn widespread criticism at the summit.

Kirsty Wright, campaigner at the World Development Movement, said today:

The UK government is promoting the sale of nature to the highest bidder. We set up the Rio+20 nature sale on ebay to demonstrate how ridiculous this is. By selling off iconic natural sites such as the Amazon rainforest and the Lake District, we are simply following the UK’s approach that the intrinsic value of ecosystems can now be quantified and that they can then be owned, speculated on and ultimately sold off to whoever has the most money."  

Lidy Nacpil, coordinator of the Jubilee South Asia/Pacific Movement on...

Sarah Reader, network and campaigns assistant

On Friday I went to a ThyssenKrupp CSA (TKCSA) steel refinery as part of a Rio +Toxic tour being run by Brazilian civil society groups. The groups planned to take a number of campaigners, researchers and journalists to different sites of corporate exploitation and environmental injustice in the outskirts of Rio so that they can witness the impact of international businesses and meet some of the local people affected by the projects and involved in resisting them.

The idea is to highlight the Brazilian government’s hypocrisy in hosting Rio +20, a conference supposedly aimed at helping progress sustainable development and the protection of the environment, whilst at the same time being complicit in projects that are wreaking havoc amongst local ecosystems and people’s lives.

Brazil’s national ‘development’ bank
The tour departed from outside the Banco National de...

The 1992 Rio Earth summit established 'sustainable development' firmly in the global political lexicon – even though the term meant, and continues to mean, different things to different people. For Stephan Schmidheiny, a CEO who was appointed chief adviser for business and industry at the summit and subsequently set up the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, it apparently means continuing with business as usual: in February, he was sentenced to 16 years in prison for the deaths of thousands of workers at his asbestos-cement factory.

As the Rio+20 anniversary conference approaches, a battle rages over the definition of another term: 'green economy'. 'A green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication' is a key conference theme (pdf). It sounds good, but what does it mean?

According to one of the ...

With just a few days to go until the start of the Rio Earth Summit, there is still very little certainty about what exactly will happen. But early indications are not great. Back in January, an initial ‘Zero Draft’ of the outcome document was publicised under the title The Future We Want. While this document outlined some generally positive sentiments, we at the World Development Movement found that it was severely lacking in substance.

Campaigners from Food and Water Watch protest against the finanicalisation of natural resources

Crucially, it didn’t define what was meant by a ‘green economy’, which is one of the main themes for Rio, leaving it in danger of being hijacked by corporate interests. This could mean the privatisation of commonly owned aspects of the natural world and the creation of new markets in ecosystem ‘services’.

Last week, the Guardian released the latest version of the document, dated 2 June when the last round of negotiations ended. For the most part, it is not looking too promising. The mainstream media has focussed on the lack of agreement between rich industrialised countries and representatives...

This morning at 5.30am (approximately 9.30am UK time), I arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the Rio +20 Earth Summit. After killing some time at the airport until it was a bit more of a respectable time to turn up on someone’s doorstep, I made my way into the centre of the city to meet the couple who own the apartment where I’ll be staying.

Within 10 minutes of arriving at the hostel where I was meeting the couple, I’d bumped into a lively group of people having breakfast who I found out are also here for the summit.

We did a quick go round of names and nationalities, and I found out I’d been lucky enough to bump into a network of people from different countries who work on indigenous rights and conservation issues. The group included people from Iran, India, Italy, Chile and Bolivia- all of whom are working on different local indigenous and conservation projects. As I was explaining what WDM does, they got excited at the mention of food sovereignty and invited me to the session they’re running tomorrow morning that happens to be on food sovereignty.

Before leaving London I printed out the current list of...

Want the latest from the Rio+20 conferece? Our campaigners in Rio will be writing regular updates from the talks and the people's summit, while our team in London will update you on the latest policy developments. Subscribe to the blog's RSS feed.

A true green economy would embrace economic justice - the right of poor communities to determine their own path out of poverty, and an end to harmful policies which put profit before people and the environment. It would reverse the tide of commodification and financialisation, reducing the role of the market and the financial sector.

One aspect of this is the adoption of stronger regulations on both the global and national level and solid legal barriers to activities that cause social and environmental damage. 

Such regulation could include the adoption of new global taxes on the highly polluting aviation and shipping sectors or the adoption of stricter, enforceable international standards on the protection of the environment. It could also mean the introduction of limits to speculation on food and a reversal of the regulatory race to the bottom between poor countries in order to attract foreign investment.

But regulation is only part of the story. The more fundamental principle of a truly green economy relates to the concept of the commons and the idea that there are some things that are too important to be determined solely by the fickle world of markets. 

The concepts of food and energy sovereignty are part of the exciting...

Markets in ecosystems and biodiversity are a next step on the route to the total commodification and 'marketisation' of nature. The arguments for this are put forward in a report called The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), written by a team led by Pavan Sukhdev, a former banker at Deutsche Bank.

The report argues that in order to protect the natural world we must consider it in financial terms. This means that forests and rivers become 'natural capital' and natural processes such as pollination by bees become 'ecosystem services' provided by corporation Earth. Of course, in order to pay for these services there must be a reliable way of quantifying their economic value. To do this, the report advocates the use of a technique called 'benefit transfer' to extrapolate the financial value of a given ecosystem from a database of other ecosystems sharing similar characteristics.

If implemented, these ideas would result in 'biodiversity banks' and speculators trading in financial instruments derived from the artificially assigned value of ecosystems. Nascent markets in biodiversity already exist and a number of 'wetland banks', which trade in the financial value of wetlands as ecosystems, have already been established in the USA.

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The green economy the UK government and others are pushing at Rio is based on the idea that we are trashing the global commons because we don’t value it properly. Therefore, they say, we need to put a financial value on nature and the services (clean air, water, resources like trees, food, fuel) it gives us. Then we can bring these things into the market and pay the proper price.

At first glance, this might seem like a good idea. Proponents of the false green economy often sound like they are saying all the right things. They appear to accept the need to protect the environment and reduce carbon emissions, and they talk of placing a proper 'value' on nature. But they are confusing value with price, and by doing so they open the door for green markets that price everything but value nothing.

Below are some examples of how this is happening and of what the alternatives look like.

Click below to find out more

Forest carbon
markets...