Global Policymakers Must Reevaluate the Imposition of Market Mechanisms to Protect Biodiversity and Instead Promote Community-led Solutions

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

[Panama City, October 20, 2025] – Global policy makers must urgently reevaluate nature-based solutions, biodiversity offsets and other market-based approaches to biodiversity loss and climate change, and instead redirect decisions towards community-driven solutions that prioritise gender responsive and human rights-based approaches, the Global Forest Coalition (GFC) said today at the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) SBSTTA 27 meeting, taking place in Panama City from October 20 to 24.

In a context where urgent action is required to address the structural causes of biodiversity loss, GFC observes a deliberate promotion in biodiversity negotiations of false solutions to the crisis that fail to contribute to solving the projected collapse of ecosystem functions.

“Market-based solutions are a greenwashing monster used to delay effective and just action. Big conservation NGOs and extractive industry lobbies promote market-based mechanisms at climate and biodiversity conferences to accelerate the destruction of nature, while Indigenous Peoples, local communities, women and youth are dispossessed,” said Heather Lee of Global Justice Ecology Project (GJEP). “These profit-based fake solutions must be immediately ended, and policies that bring equity, justice, inclusion and reparations to communities must be prioritized.”

“Systemic change and gender justice are essential to address the global interconnected crises. Defiorestation, biodiversity loss and climate change are not going to be solved with band-aid solutions. French oil giant Total allocates US$100 million annually to ‘nature-based solutions’ projects, while devastating peoples’ livelihoods and nature with drilling projects like the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) in Uganda. Why keep promoting nature-based solutions if they are used by corporations and big conservation NGOs to justify destruction? We need more holistic and intersectional approaches, environmental justice and systemic change to save forests and biodiversity,” said Valentina Figuera Martinez of GFC.

“Human rights violations, land grabbing, and entrenched inequalities are not going to be solved with generic schemes that are not aligned with the cosmovision and traditional knowledge of Indigenous Peoples. ‘Mainstreaming nature-based solutions’ and market-based schemes into national planning instruments is the wrong path to save forests and keep ecological balance. We, Indigenous communities, already have our own ancestral conservation practices that need to be supported, promoted, financed and scaled up,” said Geodisio Castillo, an Indigenous Gunadule researcher with the Center for Environmental and Human Development (CENDAH) in Panama.

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About Global Forest Coalition:

The Global Forest Coalition is a non-profit organisation with over 140 member groups worldwide dedicated to advocating for equitable, gender-just, and rights-based climate policies, with a focus on protecting forests and the communities that depend on them.

For media inquiries, please contact:

Megan Morrissey, +12023656900, megan@globalforestcoalition.org

18 Oct, 2025
Posted in Press releases, Gender Justice and Forests