Our planet's biodiversity is collapsing as the climate crisis intensifies. Entire species, ancient forests and Indigenous knowledge are disappearing. Biodiversity provides the food we eat, the air we breathe, the medicines that heal us and the ecosystems that sustain us.
Rich Global North corporations and governments – including the UK – are pushing ‘solutions’ to the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, such as carbon offsetting, which are a licence to carry on polluting and carry on profiting: business as usual. These false ‘solutions’ don’t work.
Carbon ‘offsetting’ schemes are greenwashing – allowing more carbon to be released into the atmosphere, rather than kept in the ground. The UK and other rich Global North countries fund projects – usually in the Global South – to ‘offset’ their own carbon emissions, such as by planting a single invasive tree species across vast plantations – degrading biodiversity, breaking down ecosystems and displacing local people. Yet the polluting industries these tree plantations are meant to offset continue operating unchanged.
The Global North is dodging accountability for destroying biodiversity, damaging ecosystems and further harming the Global South – those least responsible for the climate crisis.
Ahead of the 2024 UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16) in Colombia (21 Oct-1 Nov), we are calling for REAL solutions to biodiversity loss: an end to harmful extractive industries and guaranteed public investment in conservation to restore ecosystems, and repair the damage caused by centuries of exploitation in the Global South. Real solutions must be led by Indigenous communities and support climate resilience. False solutions such as ‘carbon offsetting’ must be rejected.
The UK must take responsibility for its ongoing role in driving ecological destruction and climate collapse, and back real, transformational, solutions to climate breakdown. Take action now.
