This March 6 to 9 the Convention on Biological Diversity and the governments of Ecuador, India, Japan, Norway and Sweden will host a “Global Dialogue Seminar on Scaling Up Finance for Biodiversity” in the city of Quito, Ecuador. The purpose of the seminar is to explore “financial mechanisms and resources” for biodiversity.
The Ecuadorian environmental organization Acción Ecológica has launched a call to collect signatures for an open letter that will be presented to the participants in the seminar, in which it denounces the intent to convert biodiversity into a key part of the so-called “green economy” that is meant to be consolidated through the agreements reached at the upcoming Río+20 summit.
“With the same discourses of poverty relief, conservation and sustainability that have benefited the industrial, military and financial sectors, they are once again trying to convince us that the ‘green economy', promoted by the same actors, is the solution,” the letter states. “In practice, they promote the implementation of neoliberal measures to address the climate problem, biodiversity management and protection of forests,” it stresses. As part of this process the letter points to “the false solutions to climate change such as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and so-called TEEB (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity). A tangled web of proposals that essentially seek control over land, forests, water and biodiversity as means to compensate for the loss of biodiversity or as raw materials for new technologies.”
The organizations, networks and social movements signing the letter urge the governments hosting the meeting in Quito to stop the commodification of nature, prevent the advance of the so-called green economy and “act in line with models of society that differ from the capitalist system and are built on the principles of community and on relationships with nature based on the protection of life.”
You can sign on to the letter by writing to iramos@accionecologica.org, with a copy to ivonney@accionecologica.org, or through the Acción Ecológica website:www.accionecologica.org
The full letter can be accessed in Spanish at :http://wrm.org.uy/paises/Ecuador/Carta_Abierta_Seminario_Dialogo_Global.html
