Placing the biodiversity crisis in the global economy: From extraction and extinction to vibrant futures

As the world is awash in major, compounding crises, figuring out how to tackle them without generating new problems can be a challenge. Currently, our political and economic systems, built primarily around extraction, are driving compounding crises of inequity, climate change, and biodiversity loss. For decades, world leaders and policymakers have known these crises are escalating, but have done little to prevent it. Why is this? 

New research from the Centre for Climate Justice, the Climate and Community Project, and Third World Network tries to answer this question, finding that governments are “exporting extinction” under pressure from an unequal international financial system. That is, while many governments continue to support extractive sector expansion with domestic policies, their policy autonomy to implement a just and ecological transition is highly constrained by conditions of financial and political subordination. 

These constraints must be overcome for the world’s governments to meet environmental commitments. With upcoming major UN conferences on biodiversity and climate hosted by Colombia and Brazil, respectively, bold action for climate and ecosystems, as well as international solidarity and redistributive agendas, will be on the table. These are major opportunities to redirect international policy and agreements toward solving compounding ecological crises, we know there is more work to do to ensure the right solutions are adopted, and a necessary break with the status quo of extractivism is achieved. 

Join the Centre for Climate Justice, the Climate and Community Project, and Third World Network for a Zoom webinar at 09:00 PDT/12:00 EDT/16:00 UTC on Tuesday, May 7th to learn more about new, leading research on these issues and what you can do to seize the opportunities for change ahead.