Third World Network
The world is facing a polycrisis rooted in an inequitable model: Biodiversity loss, climate breakdown and pollution are interlocking symptoms of a system that rewards short-term extraction and profit for a few, placing economic growth above social and environmental wellbeing for all.
The ‘elephants in the room’ – the structural root causes of biodiversity destruction – remain unaddressed. A new report, We Need to Talk About the Elephants in the Room (And Why Ignoring Them Perpetuates Biodiversity Destruction), focus on four distinct ‘elephants in the room’ that are unaddressed, or at any rate not squarely addressed. The global review is not designed to contend with these issues, and its focus on gaps in implementation and finance is insufficient. Addressing symptoms without tackling these deeper structural root causes will not halt biodiversity loss and harm to peoples.
The first elephant is the rules of the global economic and financial system, which actively drive extraction at the expense of social and environmental priorities. States caught inside this system find themselves on a perpetual treadmill. Many are structurally pushed to maintain and expand extractive industries to sustain their financial stability and investability, servicing debt and balancing external accounts within a system whose rules they neither wrote nor can easily change.
The second elephant is the harmful financial flows, both private and public, that continue to pour into the sectors driving biodiversity loss. Resource mobilisation for biodiversity cannot be reduced to a search for new funding; it must equally confront the vastly larger flows of harmful finance already at work. This is finance that enables, cheapens, insures or lends legitimacy to biodiversity-destructive activities – and no amount of new ‘green’ funding can outweigh it while it remains unaddressed.
The third elephant is the corporate capture of the institutions and laws meant to govern this system. Powerful corporations and business interests shape global and national institutions, laws and policy to serve their own vested interests: pressing regulators to bend standards to fit existing production models, threatening relocation when standards tighten, and using instruments such as Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) to sue governments that attempt to raise environmental protections. This effectively results in corporate rights being privileged over environmental regulations.
The fourth elephant is the transformation of the crisis itself into a financial opportunity for the profit of a few, enabled by a market logic that is flawed when applied to nature. A growing industry of market-based ‘solutions’ – biodiversity offsets and credits, green bonds, and private and blended finance mechanisms – is being touted as generating biodiversity finance. In practice, however, these schemes fail to generate the necessary finance and often deepen social and ecological harm. These false solutions serve an additional function: they allow Global North countries to appear to be acting, while they are in fact sidestepping their financial obligations to the Global South.
These four elephants all work together to protect the interests that profit from biodiversity destruction. No strategy to address the biodiversity crisis can succeed while these actors, drivers and the structures that empower them remain unnamed and unchallenged.
To effect real systemic and transformative change, action is needed to transform economic and financial conditions and challenge powerful lobbying blocs and industries. The crisis also has colonial roots, and those who contributed least bear the heaviest burdens.
The ‘elephants in the room’ rest on inequitable systems of exploitation and control, and create a 'justice gap' that must be recognised and addressed.