COP17: Wild animal offsets will drive extinctions, Indigenous Peoples warn UN – EnviroNews

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Alarmed that buffalo, jaguars, orangutans and even whales are being converted into offsets to greenwash oil and mining companies, Indigenous Peoples and civil society demand that the United Nations immediately stop monetising their sacred animals and nature as “natural capital” for carbon and biodiversity markets because it will contribute to their extinction.

At the UN Convention on Biological Diversity summit, the Executive Director of Cultural Survival, Aimee Robeson (Chahta/Chikashsha) explains: “If we truly care about biodiversity, we should not be tempted to monetise our relatives nor ecosystem services like carbon sequestration, because they have inherent value that cannot be reduced to a dollar amount.

“These market-based schemes are false solutions that exacerbate the polycrises we are facing. Not only are these schemes sacrilegious, but they also lead to net loss of biodiversity, to ecocide and to degradation of the very systems that support life on Mother Earth, including all of us. There can be no sacrifice zones, no trade-offs and no offsets if we want life on Mother Earth to survive for generations to come.”

“For Indigenous Peoples, nature is not an asset class, she is our Mother,” says Tom Goldtooth (Diné/Dakota), Executive Director of Indigenous Environmental Network. “Using Indigenous Peoples’ territories and sacred animal relatives for biodiversity and carbon credits violates the Sacred. In particular, we categorically reject buffalo credits.”

He adds: “Buffalo, which the White Man’s slaughter reduced from 60-70 million in 1853 to just a few thousand in the 1880s, are now being hailed as ‘carbon storing machines,’ and turned into soil carbon credits, so polluters can continue to pollute.

“Our buffalo, Tanka Oyate, are part of our genesis, not ‘bison bonds.’ Carbon trading is an offensive scam that threatens the future of humanity. Bring back the buffalo, not colonialism!”

Carbon traders are also selling carbon credits based on jaguar habitat. For Wilmer Lucitante of UDAPT, Friends of the Earth-Ecuador and the Indigenous A’i Kofán Nation of the Ecuadorian Amazon whose territory was devastated by Texaco/Chevron, “turning our sacred jaguars into carbon credits is a false solution to climate change that accelerates their extinction, while greenwashing extractive industries. Instead of monetising wildlife, we need to stop oil drilling and mining in the Amazon.

Orangutans are also being used for biodiversity offsets. Andine Fahira Lubis of the North Sumatra regional office of WALHI/Friends of the Earth-Indonesia denounced that the critically endangered Tapanuli Orangutan, who number fewer than 800 individuals and are the world’s rarest great ape species, are being used for biodiversity offsets to greenwash the Martabe Gold Mine in Sumatra operated by PT Agincourt Resources (a subsidiary of Jardine Matheson) in the Batang Toru ecosystem in Indigenous Peoples’ territories.

“Not only is the sheer hypocrisy of orangutan offsets staggering, but as our report clearly shows offsets cannot redeem the irreplaceable,” stated Lubis.

Other gold mines are also eager to use biodiversity credits. According to Nazeli Vardanyan, Director of Armenian Forests, “the controversial Amulsar gold mine – which civil society fought for 20 years and was approved a week before the inauguration of the UN biodiversity summit – plans to use biodiversity offsets for greenwash from the corridor of the Caucasian leopard and the habitat of the brown bear, which the mine itself threatens.”

Such financialisation of “charismatic species” and their habitat as biodiversity and carbon credits has prompted some observers to wonder if the Convention on Biological Diversity will become the Convention on SELLING Biological Diversity.

Cassandra Smithies, an expert on offsets with Global Justice Ecology Project, warns that “putting a price on nature will not save nature, it will destroy her. Indigenous Peoples’ animals, lands and oceans are not sponges for greenhouse gases, to be grabbed and pillaged by Big Oil and the extractive industries responsible for the climate emergency, which accelerates the 6th extinction. The United Nations must not be complicit with green colonialism.”