The Deshkan Ziibi Conservation Impact Bond Project: On Conservation Finance, Decolonization, and Community-Based Participatory Research

The Deshkan Ziibi Conservation Impact Bond (CIB) model was developed in Canada as a novel approach to conservation finance building on components of existing conservation funding models. The CIB model responds to the urgent need for piloting reconciliatory and cross-cultural ways of collaborating with Indigenous communities to diversify investment partnerships and redirect capital to conservation efforts that promote the regeneration of land and reciprocal and respectful relationships in southern Ontario. The CIB is a financial instrument that facilitates cross-cultural collaboration by providing a common goal amongst a diverse set of sectors, partners, and worldviews to promote healthy landscapes and empower relationships between people and ecosystems. By leveraging financial incentives, this model aims to engage partners who may not have otherwise been attracted to conservation efforts. By tying financial returns to impact metrics of holistic landscape health that incorporate Indigenous worldviews and values of nature, this innovative instrument seeks to contribute towards shifting the conservation finance paradigm more broadly by engaging in the ongoing process of decolonizing the financialization of nature.

Securing the sea: ecosystem-based adaptation and the biopolitics of insuring nature's rents

With the emergence of the so-called Blue Economy, various conservation finance mechanisms and financial structures are being proposed as a means of simultaneously securing marine biodiversity and profit-making. A novel approach that is being applied within this new conservation finance frontier is the integration of ecosystem-based adaptation and insurance. By synthesizing recent literatures in political ecology on the notion of rent and the biopolitics of nature, this article explores how the integration of ecosystem-based adaptation and insurance can be seen as a technique that is mobilized for governing ecosystem rents biopolitically. The article urges political ecologists to pay attention to how biopolitics and governance of rents intersect in market-based environmental governance. While surveying the breadth of projects that involves both adaptation and insurance, I pay particular attention to a parametric coral reef insurance that was recently introduced in the Mexican state Quintana Roo. Such a project, this article argues, involves reconceptualizing the coral reef as an infrastructure that provides benefits – ultimately rents – to the local tourist industry and indirectly the state, but this coral infrastructure is itself in need of being protected through insurance as a biopolitical measure that can ensure the future life of the coral reef by rendering calculable uncertain, future climate threats to the reef. By reconceptualizing ecosystems as infrastructure that can be insured, the notion of ecosystem-based adaptation operationalizes otherwise systematic risks posed by climate change and biodiversity loss on a local scale. Finally, I highlight some of the complications that are involved when insurance is used as a biopolitical means of making nature live.

Sustainable Finance and the Move to a Circular Economy

Ultimately, our goal is to move beyond ideas, beyond action to net zero and then to ‘climate positive’; to create a circular economy that relies on renewable energy, designs waste out of the system as much as possible, conserves and enhances biodiversity, and frames economic activity so that it is fair and equitable, and is good for the planet and society. This chapter is a forward-looking vision for sustainable finance to support these goals. It discusses scaling-up of resources to decarbonize and links sustainable finance with sustainable development. It explores the European Commission’s vision for a sustainable and climate neutral economy. It looks at Indigenous partnerships in green finance and green energy and the potential contributions of conservation finance. The chapter then turns to examples of sustainable finance in a number of sectors.

Covid-19 Outbreak, Timber Production, and Livelihoods in Nepal

The study assesses the likely consequences of COVID-19 in the forest sector of Nepal, focusing on timber production and rural livelihoods. The study conducted telephone interviews along with a review of the secondary source of information and consultations. The timber production in 2020 is likely to decrease by 80% compared to previous years, resulting in a monetary loss of NRs 647.0 million. Furthermore, local community will lose 147,447 days of employment, amounting NRs 117.9 million. This will make livelihoods of the people more vulnerable. Returning of youths from abroad can further escalate biodiversity threats. Timber import is likely to increase in the country, thus impacting on local level employment opportunities. Both long-term and short-term strategies are necessary to revive the timber production and rural livelihoods, where priority should be on increasing investment in the forestry sector. However, public-sector investment is declining. Hence there is a need to expand conservation finance portfolios to incentivise rural people on timber production and achieve synergies between conservation and livelihood outcomes.