Global Justice and the Biodiversity Crisis

The world is in the midst of a biodiversity crisis, which existing conservation policies have failed to arrest. Policymakers, academics, and the general public are coming to recognise 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, despite the fact that most biodiversity exists in the global South, and 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. The challenge this book grapples with is how biodiversity might be conserved without producing global injustice. It distinguishes policies which are likely to exacerbate global injustice, and policies which promise to reduce them. The struggle to formulate and implement just conservation policies is vital to our planet’s future.