ACB comments on the South African government’s Biodiversity Finance Plan

Humanity is facing a multi-faceted crisis of civilisation, with environmental, social, and economic dimensions. Fundamentally, this crisis is caused by capitalist dynamics of accumulation and extraction, and the associated use of the environment as a free or cheap resource and service provider. Effective biodiversity restoration and conservation requires a fundamentally different relationship with nature than the present one of domination, violence, and extraction.

The South African government’s 2017 Biodiversity Finance Plan (BFP) attempts to identify possible ways to secure adequate resources to carry out essential biodiversity work. However, it is caught in the contradictions of securing environmental protection while operating within a capitalist economic framework.

The BFP identifies possible financial “solutions” that can be clustered into five potential sources: incentives and subsidies (which can leverage private sector resources); taxes and penalties; public sector core funding; market-based interventions; and global funds.

This report considers each of these in detail, assessing possibilities and challenges, and proposes other options that can lead to a more open-ended transformative approach rather than entrenching financial power and the commodification of nature. Water tariff reform, a sharp increase in carbon taxes, and increasing penalties for non-compliance with biodiversity regulations and laws offer good potential to generate resources and action on biodiversity restoration and conservation.

We argue that the government’s Finance Plan lacks detailed consideration on: the reduction or elimination of specific harmful subsidies to fossil fuels, mining, and industrial agriculture, while retaining and extending access to energy and food for marginalised and disadvantaged populations and reallocating a share of farm input subsidies towards biodiversity-friendly production inputs.

The Sustainable Development Goals and the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (both of which the South African government supports) have explicit targets for the reduction and redirection of subsidies. Our government currently spends hundreds of billions on these subsidies annually, when just a fraction of this would be enough to support extensive biodiversity goals.

There is a key role for ongoing public sector financing. Biodiversity restoration and conservation is a public good and is essential for a sustainable economy. Interventions should not be held ransom to profit-making. Investment in management, monitoring, and enforcement capacity is potentially the best use of public sector resources if penalties for poor practice and non-compliance are sufficiently severe.

More generally, the government should consider an urgent redistribution of material resources through significantly higher progressive taxation, wealth caps, expropriation of resources above the cap, and, ultimately, social ownership and democratisation of financial institutions and key industries and their reorientation towards the common good. This may fly in the face of the prevailing global ethos, but nothing less will enable us to restore and conserve biodiversity and meet the social needs of the population in the longer term future.

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