This week, world leaders and climate negotiators gathered in Azerbaijan for COP29, the latest iteration of the United Nations Climate Change Conference. The agenda, once again, centers on financial mechanisms, digital technologies, and net-zero commitments. The COP has seen little progress as these themes perpetuate an outdated paradigm of climate action—one that continues the commodification of nature, favors industrial and corporate solutions, and delays meaningful systemic change.
COP29’s focus on market-driven solutions perpetuates the same power structures that created the current crisis. Nature cannot be reduced to carbon credits or digital algorithms, nor can ecological collapse be “solved” by financial instruments. Climate policies must expand beyond greenhouse gas emissions to address the broader harms caused by industrial agriculture, deforestation, and extractive economies.
The False Promise of Net-Zero
Net-zero emissions, a cornerstone of global climate pledges, promises to balance greenhouse gas emissions with removals or offsets. However, this concept is fundamentally flawed. It focuses solely on emissions flows, ignoring the cumulative nature of carbon, which persists in the atmosphere for centuries. Offsets, a key component of net-zero strategies, fail to reduce atmospheric CO₂ and are often speculative or ineffective, such as monoculture tree plantations.
Net-zero schemes enable polluting corporations to continue business as usual while claiming to “sequester” carbon elsewhere. These practices often provoke land grabbing, displace communities, violate human rights, and undermine biodiversity. Rather than addressing the systemic roots of climate chaos, net-zero serves as an elaborate greenwashing mechanism that exacerbates ecological harm under the guise of sustainability.
By reducing the climate crisis to carbon accounting, the net-zero narrative overshadows broader ecological disruptions, including the destabilization of water cycles, soil health, and biodiversity. Without addressing these interconnected systems, climate chaos will only worsen.
Nature-Based Solutions: Commodification Disguised as Conservation
Nature-based solutions (NBS), a prominent theme at COP29, claim to address climate and biodiversity crises by using nature to offset emissions. However, NBS often mask exploitative practices as ecological solutions. Rooted in market mechanisms, these strategies treat ecosystems as transactional resources rather than living systems with intrinsic value.
Carbon offset projects and the emerging biodiversity credit market exemplify this commodification. These schemes displace indigenous populations and local communities, perpetuating neocolonial land grabs while enabling corporations to externalize ecological destruction. Rather than fostering ecological resilience, NBS reinforce inequality and maintain the exploitative practices driving ecological collapse.
Financialization of Nature
Central to the NBS narrative is the financialization of nature: integrating ecosystems and biodiversity into financial markets. This involves assigning monetary value to natural resources and trading these values through instruments such as biodiversity credits, carbon credits, water rights, and green bonds.
Proponents argue that financial mechanisms incentivize conservation, but in reality, they reduce the complexity of life on Earth to economic units, paving the way for further ecological exploitation. As described by the Navdanya Interantional report, “Biodiversity is Life, not an Asset Class: Debunking biodiversity credits, the next wave of Bio Imperialism”, by valuing ecosystems monetarily, financialization reinforces a transactional relationship with nature, eroding community sovereignty over biodiversity conservation and regeneration.
Biodiversity credits illustrate the dangers of this approach. Marketed as tools for conservation, these credits are issued when landowners or organizations undertake activities to “protect” or “enhance” habitats. The credits are then sold to corporations seeking to offset their environmental impact.
However, Navdanya Internationals’ research has revealed the systemic failure of such schemes. A study by The Guardian, Die Zeit, and SourceMaterial found that over 90% of rainforest carbon offsets certified by Verra—the world’s leading carbon standard certifier—were likely “phantom credits” with no measurable environmental benefit. The same logic underpins biodiversity credits, which often fail to prevent ecological harm and instead displace or exacerbate destruction.
As Frederic Hache of GFO notes, even if offsetting worked perfectly, it would only displace destruction rather than reduce it. In practice, these schemes deepen ecological harm while offering corporations a veneer of environmental responsibility.
The Danger of Commodification
By framing nature as a monetizable resource, financialization erases the cultural, spiritual, and ecological dimensions of biodiversity. It undermines cultures of care and resilience rooted in reciprocity and stewardship, replacing them with transactional logics that prioritize profit over life.
Biodiversity credits, like carbon credits, primarily serve as public relations tools for corporations and governments. Meanwhile, these schemes dispossess indigenous peoples, peasants, and local communities, whose lands are targeted for so-called conservation projects. Rather than addressing the climate crisis, financial mechanisms distract from the root causes of ecological collapse, allowing extractive systems to continue unabated.
The Illusion of Technological Solutions
COP29’s embrace of digital technologies, such as AI and blockchain, as climate solutions further reflects the mechanistic worldview driving these negotiations. Initiatives like the “Green Digital Action” declaration promise resilience through innovation, but they obscure the root causes of ecological crises and reinforce the same extractive systems.
Technological fixes reduce nature to inert matter to be engineered and manipulated, sidelining regenerative, community-led approaches that genuinely heal ecosystems. By prioritizing technological innovation, corporations deflect attention from the need for systemic transformation.
The Real Path to Climate Resilience
The answers to climate chaos are not found in commodification, offsets, or technological fixes. Instead, they lie in the regenerative practices of local communities and ecosystems. Agroecology, biodiversity restoration, and regenerative farming offer solutions rooted in harmony with nature, not domination over it.
At the heart of these solutions are cultures of biodiversity and resilience—ways of living that emphasize interdependence, diversity, and care for the land. Local food systems guided by agroecological principles restore biodiversity, regenerate soils, and rejuvenate natural cycles. These practices foster ecosystems where plants, animals, and microorganisms thrive together, maintaining a delicate balance between human and non-human life.
Small farmers and indigenous communities—on the frontlines of climate disruption—are stewards of biodiversity and custodians of ancestral knowledge. Through traditional practices, they save seeds, cultivate resilient crops, and adapt to unpredictable weather extremes. This work is deeply intertwined with their cultural identities and spiritual practices, creating a living legacy of resilience.
Biodiverse agroecosystems hold the key to climate adaptation. By fostering interconnected cycles on a micro-scale, these systems regenerate the Earth’s broader ecological cycles. This approach contrasts sharply with the monocultures and extractive practices of industrial agriculture, which drive ecological collapse.
Toward True Regeneration
A transition to organic, regenerative farming systems must become a top priority. Policies should actively support the adaptive work of local communities, who are already demonstrating how to rebuild ecological resilience. By placing biodiversity, agroecology, and economies of care at the center of climate action, we can forge a path toward true ecological and social regeneration.
The answers are clear. It is time to stop pretending that commodification and technology will save us. Instead, we must support the living systems and communities already working to heal the Earth. Only through this shift can we address the climate crisis at its root and build a sustainable, equitable future.
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Food Systems and Climate – Campaign