environmentally harmful subsidies

Investors can help stop subsidies that are destroying biodiversity

During the 2010 UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Conference, 190 countries committed to phasing out or reforming subsidies harmful to biodiversity by 2020.

However, a study by The B Team supported by Business for Nature, the first in over a decade to provide an estimate of the total value of environmentally harmful subsidies across key sectors, shows governments have failed to deliver...

The world has a new plan to save nature. Here’s how it works — and how it could fail.

...Much of the air at COP15 was sucked up by discussions on closing that financial gap. They centered around three tense issues:

1) How much money will the world commit, in total, to biodiversity conservation each year?

2) How much of that money will wealthy nations give to developing countries?

3) Who will manage and distribute the money?

Governments split on ditching nature-harming subsidies in Montreal

While the Climate Home News didn't credit Earth Track in it's article, our analysis of environmentally harmful subsidies played a central role in CHN's discussion of both the challenges to, and potential from, EHS reform during the COP15 deliberations. Excerpt below:

"With one week left to strike a “once-in-a-generation” deal to protect nature in Montreal, Canada, governments are split over how to stop subsidising harmful activities like unsustainable fisheries and agriculture.

UN biodiversity talks aim to strike deal protecting third of planet

Negotiators have proposed targets to protect roughly one-third of the planet as part of UN talks aimed at striking a global deal to reverse the destruction of nature...

As well as setting out conservation goals, the draft text proposes tripling the amount of international finance by 2030, pledging $200bn annually to increase global biodiversity. This would include increasing contributions from developed economies to developing economies to at least $20bn per year by 2025, and $30bn per year by 2030.

COP15: UN pushes end to $1.8tn in subsidies linked with harm to nature

The UN development chief has warned against “illogical” and “perverse” subsidies to industries estimated at $1.8tn that harm the planet, as the body pushes for a global deal to reverse the widespread destruction of nature...

Speaking to the Financial Times from Montreal, Achim Steiner, the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, said government subsidies were contributing to biodiversity loss by encouraging unsustainable farming and fishing practices.