Carbon offsets—the money polluting business spend on projects that benefit the environment—have been growing in recent years, but it’s a long way from catching up to the money governments spend supporting businesses that are harmful to the environment.
The good news: Every country on Earth except the United States and the Holy See just committed to 23 targets intended to put the world on a path toward living in harmony with nature by 2050.
The bad news: The tepid agreement is two years late and $670 billion short of what’s needed.
The UN development chief has warned against “illogical” and “perverse” subsidies to industries estimated at $1.8tn that harm the planet, as the body pushes for a global deal to reverse the widespread destruction of nature...
Speaking to the Financial Times from Montreal, Achim Steiner, the administrator of the United Nations Development Programme, said government subsidies were contributing to biodiversity loss by encouraging unsustainable farming and fishing practices.
El estudio, publicado por The B Team y Business for Nature, analiza los conocidos como subsidios ambientalmente dañinos (EHS, por sus siglas en inglés), enmarcados en los programas gubernamentales de distintos países. Unas ayudas dirigidas, en definitiva, a provocar daños en el medioambiente. Desde la exención de impuestos para producir carne en el Amazonas hasta el apoyo a la extracción desmedida de agua en Oriente Medio.
Subsidies that are harming ecosystems, wildlife and the climate amount to nearly $2 trillion a year, researchers said on Thursday, calling for the subsidies to be reformed under talks on a global nature pact due to be agreed in the coming months.
The researchers found that annually the fossil fuel industry receives $640 billion in support and environmentally harmful agricultural activities get $520 billion, while $350 billion flows to unsustainable freshwater use and the management of water and wastewater infrastructure.
Une nouvelle étude publiée ce 17 février révèle l'ampleur, au niveau mondial, de l'impact des subventions publiques dont l'application est contraire à la sauvegarde de l'environnement.
Despite calls for the reform of incentives, including subsidies, harmful to biodiversity, including under the Convention on Biological Diversity and its 2011-2020 Aichi Targets, very few countries to date have undertaken what is considered the first step in this process, namely, to identify and assess the types and magnitudes of any incentives in place at the national level which are harmful for biodiversity or the environment more broadly.
The world is spending at least $1.8tn (£1.3tn) every year on subsidies driving the annihilation of wildlife and a rise in global heating, according to a new study, prompting warnings that humanity is financing its own extinction.
From tax breaks for beef production in the Amazon to financial support for unsustainable groundwater pumping in the Middle East, billions of pounds of government spending and other subsidies are harming the environment, says the first cross-sector assessment for more than a decade.
Government incentives will play an important role in reconciling the competing demands on our planet’s resources. But new research reveals at least $1.8tn (£1.3tn) of environmentally harmful subsidies is heading in the wrong direction every year, financing the annihilation of wildlife and global heating through support for cattle ranching, pesticide use, the overproduction of crops and fossil fuel extraction...
