Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis

Abstract

The world is currently facing a biodiversity crisis that existing conservation policies have failed to arrest. Policymakers, academics, and the public are coming to recognize that much more ambitious conservation policies are in order. But biodiversity conservation raises major issues of global justice—even if the connection between conservation and global justice is too seldom made. The lion’s share of conservation funding is spent in the global North, even though most biodiversity exists in the global South, and even though local people can often scarcely afford to make sacrifices in the interests of biodiversity conservation. Many responses to the biodiversity crisis threaten to exacerbate existing global injustices, to lock people into poverty, and to exploit the world’s poor. At the extreme, policies aimed at protecting biodiversity have also been associated with exclusion, dispossession, and violence. This book investigates how biodiversity might be conserved without producing global injustice. It distinguishes policies that are likely to exacerbate global injustice and policies that promise to reduce them. It explains how the struggle to formulate and implement just conservation policies is vital to our planet’s future.