UN Says Money Spent on Basic Living Expenses Is Bad for Nature, Should Be ‘Repurposed’

An activist places protest signs on the ground next to an illuminated sign that reads: "End the fossil era" following a protest to demand a phase out of fossil fuels on day twelve at the UNFCCC COP28 Climate Conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on Dec. 12, 2023. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

The world’s people and their governments spent close to $7 trillion in 2022 on activities the United Nations says fuels the “climate, biodiversity, and land degradation crises.”

The five biggest industries contributing to the “crises” were construction, electric utilities, real estate, oil and gas, and food and tobacco, according to a report released on Dec. 9 by the United Nations Environment Programme.

“This year’s report is a stark reminder that continuing with ‘business as usual’ poses a severe threat to our planet, reinforcing the urgent need for a transition to sustainable business practices and to stop the financing of nature destruction,” Niki Mardas, the executive director of Global Canopy, said in the report.

The report suggests the almost $7 trillion in monetary flow to “nature-negative practices” must be “dramatically reduced and ideally repurposed in favor of nature.”

It encourages governments to enact new and stricter policies to facilitate—and, in many cases, force—compliance.

The U.N. report applauds “the transformation of the global food system, extractive sectors, real estate, and infrastructure,” which increases investment opportunities in “nature-based solutions.”

It also noted that doubling or even tripling investments in nature-based solutions isn’t enough to reach its climate goals, which align with the Rio Convention targets, also known as Agenda 21. These targets include to “limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, halt biodiversity loss by ensuring that 30 percent of land and sea is protected by 2030, and reach land degradation neutrality by 2030.”

Myron Ebell, director and senior fellow at the Center for Energy & Environment Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), disagrees with the U.N.’s underlying premise and its subsequent suggestions.

“You know, the claim that human beings are—as the population grows and as people become wealthier and have more things, better housing, and so on—that we’re ruining the environment, it’s been exploded multiple times,” Mr. Ebell told The Epoch Times.

He pointed to the works of Julian Simon in the 1980s, Bjorn Lomborg, and Marian L. Tupy and Gale L. Poolye, in their book, ‘Superabundance.’

“[They] show that all the indices of environmental quality have gone up as human beings have become wealthier and more numerous. And that is incontestable,” Mr. Ebell said.

“It’s completely goofy to think that just because more money is invested in construction and providing electricity than in protecting nature, that shows that we’re not protecting nature, that we’ve got to shift our balance and the decimal somehow.

“It doesn’t seem to occur to the United Nations that it might take a lot less money to protect nature than it does to build a city or an electric grid.”

Greening the Future

The report, titled “State of Finance for Nature: The Big Nature Turnaround. Repurposing $7 trillion to combat nature loss,” is the first time the U.N. has examined negative finance flow.

In the past, its expenditure studies have been limited to financial flows that benefit so-called nature-based solutions.

The report says the annual amount of money going into nature-based solutions is nowhere near adequate.

“To meet the Rio Convention targets … finance flows to nature-based solutions must almost triple from current levels (U.S. $200 billion) to reach U.S. $542 billion per year by 2030 and quadruple to U.S. $737 billion by 2050,” the report states.

The Rio Convention targets were adopted in 1992 by 178 governments at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro.

The 2023 U.N. report says governments need to do three things to meet its climate objectives.

1. Greening finance: Reduce public and private “nature-negative” finance flows.
2. Financing green: Scale public funding and private investment into “nature-based solutions.”
3. Green and inclusive financial systems: Ensure a “just transition to a green and inclusive financial system for vulnerable groups, women, and indigenous peoples.”

The U.N. said the first recommendation is the “single most impactful intervention that can be made in the nature-climate space.”

It said most of the funding required for nature-based solutions can be secured through this method because it’s based on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ideology.

ESG methodology requires organizations to disclose their investments, which encourages them to invest in climate benefitting areas. It assesses and scores investments based on how they impact the environment, which discourages investments that the U.S. says harm the environment.

“Market leaders should continue to push for regulation and mandatory higher standards to level the playing field,” the report says.

Climate change protestors are seen marching and changing as they carry placards in Melbourne, Australia, on Nov. 6, 2021. Asanka Ratnayake/Getty Images

Additionally, greening financing includes “realigning public subsidies away from climate- and nature-negative incentives and towards nature-based solutions, climate, and nature-positive ones.”

The report used the example of Nigeria’s president eliminating fuel subsidies, which caused fuel prices to immediately increase by 175 percent.

“Removing subsidies and having people pay market prices for energy has focused attention on more efficient sources of energy,” the report states.

“As a result, Nigeria is projected to reach 1.6 gigawatts of solar capacity within a year, three times the previous forecast. In a country where 70 percent of households are not connected to the grid, and those who are, suffer frequent blackouts, a faster transition to solar will have a massive impact on access to electricity.”

The U.N.’s second and third recommendations require governments to undertake “real change,” according to the report.

“Funding for the expansion of protected areas will increase as countries implement 30x30,” the report states, referring to the goal of participating governments to set aside, and federally own, 30 percent of land by 2030.

“Given that 80 percent of what remains of global biodiversity is found within indigenous lands, the 30x30 target will have a significant impact on indigenous peoples,” the U.N. reports.

“The eviction of Indigenous Peoples and other human rights violations have occurred and continue to occur in the context of protected area establishment.”

To counter that, the U.N. says that money also needs to be pumped into “activities that enhance the role of indigenous peoples in the management of biodiversity and ecosystems.”

The report encourages governments to use “public money,” government incentives like tax credits, and legal and policy frameworks to help meet those objectives.

A Better Way

Mr. Ebell said most of the U.N.’s proposals are ill-founded.

“The fact is that as technology improves, and people can use resources more efficiently, the human and negative environmental footprint goes down. And that is true of every country that’s developed,” he said.

“At some point, a country’s population goes up, and you start to get wealthy, and pollution goes up for a decade or two, and then they pass over that hump, and pollution starts going down. Environmental quality starts going up. People start caring. As people have more wealth, they care more about the environment.”

To help facilitate a healthy environment, he said the U.N. should focus on reducing regulations and freeing up resources in areas like Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa.

“If a South American or an African country were wealthier, they would have better environments, and they'd be able to spend more money on environmental protection,” Mr. Ebell said.

“At the same time, their collective lifestyle would be doing less environmental damage, and they would have more excess income and capital to make environmental improvements.

“Just putting money into poor societies to lock up resources so people can’t use them is a lose-lose situation. It hurts the economic development of the poor country, and it harms the environment.”

Villagers use a water well installed by Water Wells for Africa in the Mongochi District, Malawi, on Nov. 6, 2023. John Fredricks/The Epoch Times

Mr. Ebell said the 30x30 plan is just the beginning. Ultimately, the goal is 50 percent government-owned land, but the U.N. is starting with 30 percent to ease the public into compliance, he said, pointing to Edward O. Wilson’s 2016 book “Half-Earth,” which called for setting aside half of the planet for conservation.

“He’s just basically anti-human,” Mr. Ebell said. “[Wilson] was the guy who made it a serious proposition in the debate amongst colleges that, really, we owe nature protecting 50 percent of it from us. And he suggested that that needed to be done immediately because the planet’s biosphere, and biodiversity, was in peril.”

Locking up resources often harms the environment instead of helping it, he said.

“Look at federal lands as the prime example of that. Not only has locking up more and more federal lands from resource production destroyed the economies of a lot of rural areas and communities, but it’s also harmed the environment tremendously,” Mr. Ebell said.

“I’m from the northwest and … if you look at what’s been done with the spotted owl and the closing of the federal forest timber production, it’s wiped out more than 100 little towns probably in the coast fringe and the Cascades in Oregon and northern California, and I suppose a few in Washington.”

A firefighting airtanker drops retardant over the Grandview Fire on July 11, 2021 northeast of Sisters, Ore., on July 11, 2021. Oregon Department of Forestry via Getty Images

In 1973, President Richard Nixon signed the far-reaching Endangered Species Act into law, and in 1990, the spotted owl was listed as threatened under the Act.

Following that designation, the federal government set aside 10 million acres of federal land to protect old-growth forests—the spotted owl’s natural habitat—causing timber harvest on federal lands to drop by approximately 90 percent, according to the Oregon Forest Research Institute.

“Now we have, instead of timber production, catastrophic fires,” Mr. Ebell said.

“And if you look at where the catastrophic fires are, they’re not on private forests, which are managed for timber production. They’re in the places where the Forest Service has stopped allowing logs and trees to be cut in the National Forest. It’s an environmental disaster, but it’s also been an economic disaster for the whole area.”

As for the spotted owl, a 2021 report in ScienceDirect showed that spotted owl populations have continued to plummet by as much as 80 percent in some places in the northwest.

The report says barred owls moving into the spotted owl’s territory are to blame.

Reality Check

Despite disagreeing with most of the U.N.’s recommendations, Mr. Ebell agrees with the agency’s call to eliminate subsidies. However, he emphasized that it should be done over time and applied to everything.

“Over time, countries should be removing subsidies, because then the market will distribute the amount of energy that people can afford in the most efficient way,” he said.

“Nigeria is one of these Petro states with a lot of oil and gas production. And instead of pursuing policies that allow for the development of their economy, they try to keep their people satisfied by giving them extremely inexpensive gasoline.

“The environmental movement has made a big deal out of the enormous subsidies the oil and gas industry gets. But almost all of that, 99 percent of that, is subsidizing the price of gasoline for the people in that country. There just isn’t good economics in it.”

A Sri Lankan activist wearing a mask of Sri Lanka's President Gotabaya Rajapaksa takes part in a demonstration to denounce the shortage of commodities as the country faces a major foreign exchange crisis, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Nov. 16, 2021. ISHARA S. KODIKARA/AFP via Getty Images

When looking to the future, Mr. Ebell said it’s essential to consider reality.

For example, he pointed to how, in 2021, Sri Lanka’s then-president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, announced that his country would reject conventional agriculture and immediately go 100 percent organic to be more “in sync with nature.”

Thirteen months later, Sri Lankans were starving, millions of dollars in agriculture from tea and rice sales had evaporated, and Mr. Rajapaksa was forced to resign and flee his country.

“More money could be spent on taking care of the environment, there’s no doubt about it, but a lot of the money currently being spent is not being spent in a way that’s actually progressing the environment. We’re very inefficient,” Mr. Ebell said.

“So, I would say that the claim that we need to spend three or four times more per year globally is highly suspect.”