Image by Justin Catanoso for Mongabay. Retrieved from news.mongabay.com
At COP16, an international conference here on the edge of the Amazon that is devoted to enacting plans to protect forests, oceans and the biodiversity living in both, a staggering financial reality took center stage in a day-long event Sunday:
Each year, wealthy countries and large institutional lenders devote $1.7 trillion in subsidies, tax incentives and tax breaks that damage or destroy nature while directing just one-quarter of that amount to conserving or restoring the natural world, according to World Wildlife Fund.
At the start of the final week of the 16th biennial United Nations Biodiversity Conference, known as COP16, attendees are hearing unusually bold talk and high ambition focused on the typically off-limits notion of reducing and eliminating so-called “perverse subsidies.”
What’s a “perverse subsidy? Here’s one example: the $640 billion provided annually to the fossil fuel industry that has generated enormous profits for that industry and economic prosperity largely for the Global North, while simultaneously creating the conditions for global warming, ruinous weather disasters, runaway deforestation and record species extinctions.