Press Conference: Biodiversity Offsets and Credits: Who Benefits, Who Bears the Costs?, UN Convention on Biodiversity - COP 17

Welcome to our press conference entitled Biodiversity Offsets and Credits: Who Benefits, Who Bears the Costs? My name is Valentina Figueira Martinez from the Global Forest Coalition, and I am delighted to be the moderator today. The proliferation of biodiversity offsets and credits to implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework is unacceptable. corporations, government, big conservation NGOs, and consultancies have been subsequently pushing for these mechanisms and continue rebranding biodiversity markets as high integrity, gender responsive, or that ensure the respect for human rights in communities and territories. However, the realities on the ground are different. We are documenting what is on and we understand that these biodiversity markets are perpetuating biodiversity destruction, they continue violating human rights, land grabbing, gender injustices, green colonialism and other impacts on the ground. Biodiversity offsets and credits are fundamentally flawed. They lack integrity, they violate human rights, they perpetrate gender injustices on the communities, and they represent a threat to nature, indigenous peoples, local communities, women, and youth. Let me be clear about this. There will be no biodiversity credits without offsetting. not possible. So promoting credits and promoting these markets with the expectation that they will not bring offsetting is unsustainable and is also politically naive and contradicts the realities of the communities on the ground. Biodiversity is not a financial asset, it is not a financial opportunity to continue destruction, and of course it serves the interests of large corporations, of Global North polluters and destroyers of biodiversity. Developed countries must honor their commitments under Article 20 of the Convention. They must fulfill their agreements. It's an agreement. It's already part of the Convention, and they must follow their commitments. They should and continue supporting public finance, confronting extractive industries, industrial forestry and mining and other forms of extractivism, and of course fighting against the overconsumption model and the systemic problems that the society has. Global mapping studies have documented over 12,900 biodiversity projects, offsetting projects across 37 countries, while community-led and women-led real solutions remain underfunded. This is also unacceptable, the imbalance. And of course, incremental adjustments to ensure the status quo, it's unacceptable, and we need to denounce this continuation. And also the fact that parties and governments continue to put faith in biodiversity markets to solve structural problems and complex problems will not solve the root causes of biodiversity loss and will not help all the actors to achieve the targets of the KMGPF. Communities are advancing on real solutions. The solutions are already there. Communities have the power, have the capacities to implement their traditional solutions, their women-led solutions, which are centered on rights, on gender responsive approaches, and on non-market based mechanisms. And actually, these incremental adjustments to the status quo or continuing these putting efforts and putting energies, putting resources into biodiversity markets will contribute to not achieving the targets of the of the KMGF, but actually continue what we see today in the negotiations and in the corridors that the discussions are not actually being The relevant discussions are actually not being discussed here. Today I'm joined by a panel of experts who will expose the dimensions of biodiversity offsets and credits, the impacts and critical elements from the ground. Myrna Fernandez from the Third World Network, Uli Arta Sargian from WALHI Indonesia, Pantori Tri Kuswardono of Yayasan Pikul Indonesia and Nele Marian from Friends of the Earth International.

Thank you so much, Valentina. I will explain a bit the policy context where biodiversity offsets and credits come. Biodiversity offsets and credits are mentioned in target 19 of the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework, and they are listed as innovative financial mechanisms for biodiversity. And it says on the target that they should be encouraged with social and environmental safeguards. To start with, they are not really innovative. Biodiversity offsets and credit schemes started in the '70s in the US, and since then, they have been showing social and environmental impact and that they don't really create any gains for biodiversity. In fact, most of the projects that happened in complex ecosystems like oceans and forests showing that you cannot really recreate these ecosystems because the science of ecosystem restoration is not advanced enough to compensate the losses and recreate these ecosystems that will take years, hundreds of years in some cases, to regenerate in opposition to the very little time that is needed to destroy an ecosystem. Also, the fact that the target mentions social and environmental safeguards, while we don't have efficient social and environmental safeguards in the implementation of the CBD and in the Rio Conventions, it's very discouraging. Because none of the safeguards can allow that biodiversity offsetting is not allowed and that only credits will happen. As Valentina said, there is not a reason to have biodiversity credits without offsetting. If I am an investor and I want to invest in nature conservation, it makes more sense to make a direct donation to projects that are showing biodiversity conservation on the ground. We don't have a framework in the convention that allows for biodiversity offsetting with this kind of effective safeguards. What is being promoted now in the CBD, but it started outside the CBD, is this high integrity framework that is supported by the IAPB, the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits, the BCA, the Biodiversity Credits Alliance, and the World Economic Forum. We can assure that this framework is not really a high integrity framework because it allows for biodiversity offsetting. It reduces very complex ecosystem to a single set of tradable and simplified metrics. It lacks additionality because it introduces maintenance credits linked to conservation that will happen anyway. It allows to open the door to unlimited speculation because it doesn't deny the secondary trading. And it contains big provisions to ensure equity and fairness for the communities on the ground, especially indigenous peoples, local communities, women, and youth. And we have a lot of social and environmental impacts. Among the environmental impacts, we can ensure that there is almost no additionality because in most cases there is no additional conservation value. There is not a permanence, meaning that the impacts of conservation very rarely last on time because the allocation of the monitoring frameworks are really short, schemes like five, six years, when you need 10, 20, 50 years to ensure that a restoration project is successful. You have leakage of impacts, meaning that the impact is not suppressed, it's just translocated somewhere else, but it's happening anyway. And we have greenwashing because a lot of the companies that will purchase these credits will make it to make themselves greener in image, but they won't really address their environmental impacts. And on social impacts, we see a lot of displacement, especially from indigenous peoples and local communities, because the implementation of the projects affects their livelihoods and they need to be relocated. We see violations of human rights. And we see also violation of land tenure rights, especially for the ones that don't have land tenure security, which are in most of the cases women or indigenous peoples. And these are the communities that are most affected by the implementation of these schemes, the communities that depend the most on nature. as Valentina said, there are many other ways to finance nature that are more effective, that will get to the nature keepers on the ground and don't need intermediaries and consultancies or NGOs or offsetting firms to get most of the money while while the smallest part of the benefits gets to the communities on the ground. So we should be exploring these ones. I will pass the word to my colleagues. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Uli.

Yeah. Good afternoon, everyone. I can talk about the specific case from the Batang Toru, North Sumatra, a gold mine, a biodiversity offset, and what this model means for indigenous people and local community. Batang Toru is the only home of the Tapanuli orangutan, the rarest great ape on Earth, with fewer than 8,000 individuals left. The same forest is also a water source and a livelihood base. While he reports that the mines' work area overlapped the headwaters of five major river basins that supply nearly 1,100 people. Communities also depend on the forest for farming and for in case reason. Part of this landscape is customary land. The operator, PT Agincourt Research, says mining and conservation can coexist. It points to the mitigation hierarchy and to a biodiversity offset with around 507,000 hectare of planet protect area we have review that climb and we see serious Gap the offset location and metric have not been made public so no one can verify no net loss and for a critically and endangered species in a key biodiversity area some losses simply cannot be offset Our deepest concerns is who pay for the offset. First, land and consent. Offset land is being secured through purchase and long lease in communities with real economic pressures. According to interview, many village were not told that the land would serve as an offset or who was funding it. Communal land offset Common land often has no legal title, so community hold only social ownership. Will buyers bring cash and legal certainly that is not free prior and informed consent. The second, community cohesions. In one customary community, less over split people who had stood together to defend their territory. Trust broke down. and the process of mapping and securing their customary boundaries has stalled. Such a legal mechanism that could lock this in. Indonesia 2024 conservation law creates preservation area. Under Article 9, a landholder who is unwilling to carry out conservation activities must release their land rights with compensation. Part of the offset area have been proposed for this status. Our concern is the community who have protected this forest for generations could be treated as obstacle on their own land, while the conservation benefit is counted as the company compensation. If this model work for one mining company, others can copy it, buy or lease community forests, obtain state recognitions, and claim it is an offset for destructive elsewhere. then works against the framework's commitment on rights, participation, and access to information, and on policy coherence. To the Indonesian government, post new clearing, publish the offset data, and do not designate reservation area on customary land without genuine concern. To funder and investor, condition finance on full disclosures, proof of FPIC and independent monitoring. And to parties, make a clear the offset cannot be used for irreversible biodiversity at the indigenous people and local community, but lead conservation on their land, not displayed by it. You cannot offset the irreplaceable and you cannot conserve a forest by taking it from the people who have keep understanding. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you, Ollie. Yes, go ahead. Thank you.

Sorry. Okay. Uh yeah, I'm I'm going to explain the the the results from people conservation summits happening in August 2026 in Jakarta, Indonesia. There is actually, during the discussions of nature financializations, there is a strong statement from communities that actually finance is not their first concerns. They are not poor, and they don't really need the money. What they really need is freedom and security. to go on to continue their sustainable lifestyles to protect and caring nature. Because they said that nature cannot be financialized, cannot be valued into a credit because nature is the life of communities. It is a very strong statement from the communities during the discussions and they said that without any security of territorial security, uh, general securities, financial, financial, financialization, uh, a new financial mechanism, uh, could destroy their lifestyle, could create disputes and escalating conflicts among communities. So their, uh, demands is actually first, uh, tenorial securities, And the second is to direct public funding and grants to work indigenous peoples and local communities as right holders and decision makers. And the second, make polluters and destructive economic actors accountable for preventing and repairing harm. And the fourth is to reform public incentives and financial flows that continue to support biodiversity destructions. and to evaluate success through ecological outcomes, rights, community authority, equitable distributions, not simply the volume of finance mobilized or credit issues. Our discussions in Indonesia shows that the problem is not simply how to finance nature, it is who controls the territory, who defines its values, who receives the benefits, whether the financial systems help stop the destructions, or create new opportunities to profit from it. So rights before returns, security territories before financial instruments and direct finance without requiring communities to commodify nature is their statements, the community statements from the People's Conservation Summits in August 2026. Thank you.

Thank you, Patti. Yes, and part of the uncomfortable question, I think it's to answer who benefits, right, from biodiversity offsets and credits. And we don't see that that question is often answered here. It's all about pushing for frameworks, pushing for more resources and energies to implement, to develop biodiversity offsets. But the uncomfortable question is who benefits from biodiversity offsets, who gains more, and who loses more. communities are gaining anything? How is access to decision making? So Nele is here also to complement and expose who benefits and who bears also the costs.

Thank you very much, Valentina. And yes, I was going to pose that question, who benefits and who pays for biodiversity offsets in practice? There's a dominant narrative in this convention, and it's a narrative that says that biodiversity offsets will actually bring finance for conservation. You will see it in Target 19, you will hear it in the corridors, it's a bit all around. I want to contrast this with some reality. Actually, who benefits? It's not that there is private money flowing to conservation, it's rather the opposite. It is thanks to the existence of biodiversity offsets that paying quite cheaply, private enterprises can have the right to keep destroying. They have the right to keep doing extractivism. That is their benefit and that is why they are willing to do the offsets. This is a very important point. Somebody else who really benefits from the offsetting is all the intermediaries. There's huge institutes being set up, there's lots of consultants, there's lots of calculations that need to be done to know what is the baseline, what is the amount of biodiversity that is in one area and in another area. All the investment that goes into that could directly go to biodiversity protection, to support the communities who are conserving biodiversity. On the contrary, what we now see is that the communities who are on the ground, having been protecting the territories for years, they are fighting off extractive industries who come in their territory, they destroy it, and then they go somewhere else and they say, we will protect a territory which actually doesn't need protecting. But they say, no, no, no, this is avoided, what's it called, destruction. It's exactly the case where Uli was talking about. They tell, okay, this area was going to be destroyed. We are making it an offset and therefore it's not being destroyed. First, this is wrong because the communities were living there and were protecting it. And second, if it were right, the baseline is destruction. We cannot, in an era when the biosphere is well beyond the planetary limits in terms of destruction, we cannot have baselines of destruction. So this is really something to take into account. And of course, who loses are the communities, the communities in the area where the extraction happens and the communities in the areas where they are being excluded from doing activities in their own territories. These are the people who are paying for it. And communities are being put up one against another. because one community maybe gains a little bit, but it's at the cost of another community, which area, which territory is under attack of extractivism. So this is huge losses. Now, maybe we can say, actually, the gains are for the countries. Countries in the Global South are really, really meaning money, and this is absolutely true. The global north is saying there's a lack of money. We can't pay everything. Let's bring in private money. And this is the source of private money. That's also how it's captured in the global biodiversity framework. But also, this is not true. When you look at the maybe it is true for individual cases, a certain country can say, oh, look, I have gained this money thanks to offsetting. I believe that can be true. But when you look at the overall thing, How much money is going into destruction? How much money is going into the setting up of all the offsetting institutions, the brokers, the intermediaries, the baseline setters, et cetera, et cetera? All that money that goes into it does not go into conservation, and that money should go into support for developing countries. And again, that money that is actually going into supporting the offsetting structures, it also lets developed countries off the hook in their responsibility of having to pay, which is actually their responsibility under this convention in Article 20. So there's a lot of things which actually where the dominant discourse in this convention is one thing. And when you look a bit deeper, you see that actually the contrary happens. And all of this comes actually in order to be able to protect economic growth, in order to protect extractivism, in order to protect corporate interests. And this is what needs to be addressed. there will be no mitigation hierarchy that can stop the destruction of nature. What needs to stop the destruction of nature is a real change in how we think about the relationship between nature, communities, policies, governments. These relationships need to be rethought and we need to make sure that the rights of nature, the rights of communities, that they come in the first place and then it will be possible to protect nature. And for that we will need to start regulating corporations instead of giving them a way out to pay for offsetting and in that way allowing destruction. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Yes, I think that we will have some time for some questions. If you have any questions, please go ahead, or any comments. Yes, go ahead.

At the Raoul Wallenberg Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law. So my question is, hearing these presentations, going through the draft decisions that were proposed by the subsidiary body of Article 8J, I was kind of puzzled why the term environmental human rights defenders is not mentioned, because many of the things that you are mentioning, I see much more emphasis on how economic resources should be going, for example, to communities, indigenous peoples, and this is of course very necessary, very important. But I'm missing that element of target 22, that it is there in the framework and also it is there in the gender action plan. Thank you.

Maybe we do have... Yes. There are a lot of things that are not being mentioned, often in the CBD, in the negotiations. The issue of the rights holders is one element, of course, as my colleagues were mentioning, we want to invite you to look beyond the discussions. We recognize that it's important, the decisions, right, what is being negotiated here, but there are other critical conversations that are not being included. Biodiversity offsets and credits are part of the KMGF. They are included. There is a mention, a specific mention, right, on target 19. And there's also target 18 related to perverse incentives. But at the same time, the same target includes Mother Earth centric actions and the role of indigenous peoples, local communities, women and youth to implement the KMTBF. nevertheless, they are conflicting concepts, right? So the idea here is to bring a narrative, a political message, so that people understand that systemic issues need to be confronted now. And that's a hard conversation. We know, we understand. But biodiversity offsets and credits lack scientific credibility. They are flawed mechanisms. There is evidence that is mentioned, and I think that it's the important question here. I recognize we need to include women, youth, stakeholders, and other elements. measurable targets, statistics, baselines, but there's an important question that Nele was putting at the end of her intervention, which is the need to really move beyond what we see in the surface and look at the, not at the tip of the iceberg, but look below what's going on, what the perverse incentives, how much is being invested in biodiversity destruction, how much is being lost, how communities are being impacted, right? So those are questions that we would like to, yeah, bring to the table and discuss. Would like to, yeah.

Mm-hmm. I'm Miles Zulu from Save Environment and People Agency, a local NGO in Zambia, member of WE-CAN Global Network, which support women in the drylands. I work in the extractive industry. Where I come from, we have a region which is a new copper belt, and we have three giants mining that is going there. We work in women and rights, because as you have already alluded to, extractive takes away the rights to land, because people are displaced. So the issue here that I've seen, we are People who are in mining, they are concerned about their profits. They are not concerned about what the people are going through. And how can this such convention partner with the local NGOs that are fighting this vice? Because these are big boys. They have got big lawyers, and the civil society doesn't have that capacity. Okay, so we need a consolidated efforts, the support that the local NGO can be given so that they can help the people on the ground. So how can we do that? That's what I want to know. What support can we get? And the other issue is that the people who are in conservation of the biodiversity, you know, they don't really benefit out of it. And yet the people who are ruining the biodiversity are the people who are getting rich out of that. So how can we change the scenario? Thank you.

Thank you for your question. We have only one minute, actually. So, yeah, who would like to, Mirna, Nele, Uli, Poli, who would like to answer? Mirna, go.

Thank you. Okay, I'll make a quick answer to actually both questions because they were relevant. On the point on environmental defenders, we agree that we need to mainstream the rights of all human rights, especially the rights of vulnerable communities, environmental defenders, biodiversity stewards, because they are the ones who are most affected by these kind of policies. And we don't see any serious effort to address these through safeguards or anything that can be really effective safeguarding their rights and that's why we are so worried about it. And what can we do together about it? Because you are right, it is the big companies, the big mining, the big polluters that are behind these schemes. Actually, the net gain standard, I think, this publication is co-authored by Rio Tinto researchers. Rio Tinto is a huge mining company with big environmental impacts and social impacts. So We can expect the big polluters, especially big mining, for example, to be the ones interested in developing standards that allow them to continue destroying biodiversity and the ways of life of people. What we can do is to reunite and resist these mechanisms in the CBD, because at least here they are not legitimized. In the climate convention, carbon offsetting is completely legitimate. There is a protocol that people can just go and purchase carbon credits through the UNFCCC. We cannot do that yet in the CBD, and that is what we are trying to oppose. I will pass it to some friends.

Thank you, everyone. We have finished, but we will be happy to answer more questions. We also have publications here. We talk a lot about biodiversity offsets, but there are also real solutions. that are being implemented by communities on the ground, centered on rights. There are also more material that we have on credits and offsets that we would very much like to share with you. Thank you.