Why language matters for conservation

The corporate framing of biodiversity loss

The recently formed Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) is an excellent example of the way the financial and corporate sectors frame biodiversity loss. The TNFD brings together financial institutions and companies to “deliver a framework for organizations to report and act on evolving nature-related risks.” At the TNFD’s launch event, panellists talked about the ecological crisis as though it was a purely technical problem, which hasn’t been solved yet because corporations and investors haven’t been able to adequately measure the environmental risks and impacts of their operations. Nature must be assigned a cash value to become visible in economic and financial operations, because only that which can be measured can also be managed.

According to this logic, investors and corporations will change their behaviors and redirect investments to make them “nature positive” as long as they have a methodology to measure and account for their impacts on the environment. It is questionable, however, whether such a framework will do the trick: A recent investigation by Urgewald and the Rainforest Action Network shows that none of the major global financial institutions has adopted the necessary policies to curb carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Their investments continue to fund forest clearance, mining, polluting industries and agricultural monocultures with well-documented and devastating environmental impacts.

Slogans like “Making nature count” or making Nature “visible,” suggest that Nature currently neither counts nor is visible. Only through an economic lens can Nature be seen, valued and accounted for. But the idea that Nature needs a price directs attention towards purely technical issues around economic accounting and ignores essential questions about interests, power structures and the system itself. The logic and language of financial management depoliticizes biodiversity loss and reduces conservation to mere resource management that just needs to quantify, measure and bank its assets. Describing Nature as natural capital to be managed in habitat banking or ecosystem accounting schemes perpetuates a purely technocratic, reductionist logic and worldview: We are not talking about living beings and a complex web of life, but about stocks and shares.

Conservationists often embrace this language in the attempt to make the case for conservation and find joint solutions that work for different actors. However, does this alter our own positions and behaviors in the end? The solutions offered by an economic framing raise the question of whether the priority is really conservation or simply to minimize risks and uncertainties for businesses to maximize profit. The “business case for biodiversity” also places the burden of proof on conservationists: People who care about Nature need to justify their beliefs and actions, while those who don’t care don’t have to convince anyone at all. But if protection needs constant justification, then destruction is the default.

Making Nature bankable, measurable and comparable also makes her replaceable. Take biodiversity offsetting, for example. If a company wants to build a highway through an important ecosystem with rare species, then it can “offset” the damage done in one place by protecting or restoring a “comparable amount of biodiversity” somewhere else. Again, the focus here is the underlying logic, not so much on the usefulness of this practice in a specific case. We are currently building, producing and consuming far more than is needed for human well-being, with devasting impacts on Nature. The real task is to determine what is essential infrastructure and what is not. Offsetting implies that this type of development is inevitable and our only option is to make it less harmful.

Language can guide the way

The values embedded in this language have justified and enabled the destruction of Nature for centuries. If we are serious about transformative change, then we need to talk about the system itself and not reduce biodiversity loss to just a problem of accounting. But what does that mean in practice? Time to halt the ecological and climate crisis is getting dangerously short, and the funding and political will to fix it is nowhere in sight. We need to set clear priorities and focus on what has already proven to be most effective: Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) across the world already demonstrate what “living in harmony with nature” actually looks like (e.g. in the Territories of Life: 2021 Report).
IPLCs govern at least one quarter of the global land area which coincides with around 80 percent of the planet’s biodiversity and their important role in maintaining biodiversity is increasingly recognized; however, they are facing growing violence and pressure from resources extraction, mining and infrastructure development. Recognizing and protecting their territorial rights and knowledge, including their rights to self-determination, and supporting their collective governance systems can be the basis for achieving global biodiversity, climate and sustainable development targets.

However, rather than supporting and promoting actual policies and action in that regard, people are busy trying to figure out nature-related disclosures for the finance sector. But framing our relationship with Nature as an “asset management problem” with “market-led” solutions has had mixed results at best, with little “measurable” positive impact on Nature. Moving away from the purely technocratic framing and its alleged solutions that are entirely detached from local realities, can open up new spaces to focus on what is really important and direct precious resources, attention, time and energy accordingly.

This article was first published on 20th October in Eco-Business.