The financial sector must step up and participate in the process of reforming subsidies that are harmful to nature, Colombia’s environment ministry has said, as the government prepares to host UN biodiversity talks later this year.
Speaking at an event on the margins of the 6th UN Environment Assembly in Nairobi, Kenya, the head of international affairs at the Colombian Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development, Maria Teresa Becerra Ramirez, called for a cross-sectoral approach to redesigning subsidies for sustainable development.
“It’s important that we have the financial sector involved in identifying how we can work together, and implement financial mechanisms that are more in line with the objectives of biodiversity conservation,” she said.
According to Becerra Ramirez, harmful subsidies are also being addressed in each country’s National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plan (NBSAP), due by the beginning of the COP16 UN biodiversity summit, which will take place in Colombia from Oct. 26 to Nov. 1 later this year.
“Since last year, the government of Colombia has been very active in opening discussions about the financial mechanisms needed to address the biodiversity crisis,” she added.
“Incentives and subsidies to the agriculture sector strongly impact biodiversity.”
The OECD has estimated that potentially harmful subsidies cost $500 billion annually, exceeding the global public investments in nature of $150 bln.
According to a World Bank study, harmful agricultural subsidies are responsible for the loss of 2.2 million hectares of forest annually, equivalent to 14% of global deforestation.
Subsidies can also lead to species loss, over-exploitation of natural resources, land degradation, and pollution by under-pricing the use of natural resources, fuelling over-consumption, or incentivising an increase in production, the UN Development Programme (UNDP) has also said.
MEETING TARGET 18
Since 2021, the Colombian government has worked with UNDP’s Biodiversity Finance (BIOFIN) Initiative to investigate the impact of subsidies on species and ecosystems.
“We developed an inventory of 42 instruments of the agricultural sector. As a result, the study identified that 12 of these instruments are linked to biodiversity loss drivers,” Becerra Ramirez said.
“In Colombia, these drivers are mainly related to the spatial expansion of the agricultural frontier in natural ecosystems that has caused land use changes and deforestation.”
During the panel, UK Minister for the Environment, Rebecca Pow, called on country representatives in Nairobi to join the BIOFIN framework to map and repurpose environmentally harmful subsidies.
“All governments should take this opportunity to use public money to bolster public goods rather than to undermine them,” she said.
“We know this is very challenging, and it does require changes to the structure and the processes that people and their livelihoods rely on. So it is critical that we bring the people with us along this journey.”
In January, UNDP released a set of guidelines developed by BIOFIN to enable governments to redesign environmentally harmful subsidies.
“Without a substantial change, it will be arguably impossible to achieve the goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF),” UNDP said.
Under target 18 of the GBF, agreed in 2022 at the COP15 UN biodiversity summit, countries are required to “eliminate, phase out, or reform incentives, including subsidies harmful for biodiversity … and scale up positive incentives for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity”.
By Sergio Colombo – sergio@carbon-pulse.com
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