Commodifying and financializing nature

The rush continues to commodify soil carbon or other "ecosystem services" and trade these on some kind of markets. USDA is paving the way for Wall Street and large corporations to commodify soil carbon which will do little to mitigate climate change.

The shell game of carbon markets

Editorial from the Guardian that provides links to some of their January 2023 reporting on carbon markets:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jan/26/the-guardian-view-on-carbon-offsetting-a-model-with-dangerous-flaws

Are we asking the wrong questions? These two excellent videos suggest that we are.

Divide and rule by Vandana Shiva

Banking Nature

See also:

Indigenous Environmental Network's trenchant responses to so-called climate finance, climate-smart agriculture, and nature-based solutions:

      https://www.ienearth.org/cop27/

Richard Norgaard's 2009 paper, "Ecosystem services: from eye-opening metaphor to complexity blinder"

Daniela Gabor, The Wall Street Consensus

Abstract: The Wall Street Consensus is an elaborate effort to reorganize development interventions around partnerships with global finance. The Billions to Trillions agenda, the World Bank’s Maximising Finance for Development or the G20’s Infrastructure as an Asset Class all call on international development institutions and governments of poor countries to ‘escort capital’ – institutional investors and the managers of their trillions in assets – into investable development assets. For this, ten policy commandments aim to forge the de-risking state and accelerate the structural transformation of local financial systems towards market-based finance.

John Bellamy Foster on resistance to the financialization of nature

https://monthlyreview.org/2022/04/01/the-defense-of-nature-resisting-the-financializaton-of-the-earth/

Wendy Brown on Cultures of Capital Enhancement: