by Veera, the IPCC’s AR611
synthesis
report released some months after the Guardian’s carbon research findings, also demonstrated that despite a $1.16 trillion impact investing market and a billion-dollar carbon market, we are seeing no positive systemic impacts in the slowing of key contributors to the climate crisis included GHG emissions, oceanic warming, deforestation and species extinction to name a few. The focus on many carbon projects has been planting trees because companies are concerned with the sunk costs of carbon projects and want to turn their investment into something revenue generating. So, they plant trees in a conventional industrialized farming monoculture style; tree plantations which are ineffective at capturing carbon and which they can then harvest and sell, but which predominantly fail because the projects lack the rich diversity required for life to thrive. Likewise, there are many examples of investments into wetland restoration in Southeast Asia where poverty-stricken villages surround the project and within a few years, the project has degraded again as local people seek resources to lift them out of poverty. There are many more points of failure both in carbon projects and other nature positive solutions beyond these two examples. Given the failure of conventional approaches to the design and development of carbon projects, where are the natural assets coming from
ISSUERS AND INVESTORS
The issuer is the Natural Asset Company, which may be formed by natural owners including: • Governments • Private landowners • Farmers/Ranchers • Corporations seeking to improve the sustainability of their supply chain
NACS are designed to generate a market return that appeals both to investors focussed on socially responsible, impact, or sustainable opportunities and those with broader investment mandates, investors in NAC equities could include:
• Institutional investors (e.g., pensions, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations) • Family offices • Multilateral development banks
• Retail investors Source: Intrinsic Exchange
for NAC’s if 80% of existing biodiversity is stewarded by indigenous folks?
The 30% that has the remaining biodiversity - Indigenous land. Indigenous people are being stripped of their rights to steward their land and the management rights are being put into the hands of the investors who advised us into environmental crisis in the first place – the Wall Street old guard. The IEG, by the way, is a consortium of an American development bank and Rockefeller. The Wall Street leaders sit on the boards of the western conservation institutions such as WWF; they are major investors into carbon projects, and they will also be the major investors to NACs. The major players of Wall Street have been strategically positioning themselves to control the remaining biodiversity of the planet. We are not learning from our past failures; we are not even open to acknowledging the failures exist in most instances. There is a reason why the remaining 80% of the world’s biodiversity is on indigenous land. They know what they are doing, they live in the right relationship with the land. Is it really a sign of intelligence to shift the management away from indigenous safekeepers of biodiversity into the hands of people who can only view nature as an asset to be capitalized upon? We have already seen the heavily degenerative impact this approach has caused since the 1940’s.
Notice how NAC’s have not mentioned indigenous leaders anywhere in their Issuers and Investors list
If nature is traded through NACs, private sector enterprises hold to the rights to ecosystems services. Earth serving humans is a colonial narrative of property and domination, but who decides - how, what, who and how much? In living systems principles Earth is a living being, not a commodity. Living in balance and harmony is not present in current economic assumptions that are based on extraction and competition for scarce resources. This is evident in our breaching six of the nine planetary boundaries12 – sending us deeper into crisis. How will NACs value the “being” state of nature and the role its interconnected complexities serve in symbiosis with other beings. For example, how is the mother tree in a forest system valued over other trees as the source of life in the system, or is a tree just a tree? Can she even be identified by the men in suits driving the decisions?
NACs are essentially picking apart Mother Earth and selling her off as opposed to having assets create conditions for all of live to thrive. Neo-classical economics has seen our role in relationship to the earth as value neutral vs. value adding relationship of indigenous cultures, and value neutrality removes responsibility
16 | ADMISI - The Ghost In The Machine | Q3 Edition 2024
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36
