Covered in this post:
Effectiveness ignores the voices of the people most affected by injustice. It uses flawed concepts of data and evaluation. It minimizes complexity. It is short-term-focused. It punishes failure, and rewards risk-aversion. It uses harmful proxies for quality. It ignores the intrinsic worth of individuals. It favors larger, mostly-white-led organizations. Solutions: First, we must ground “effectiveness” on race, equity, and social justice. Second, we must see Representation as essential to effectiveness. Third, we must trust the people most affected to define effectiveness. Fourth, we must invest in organizations holistically. Fifth, we must consider the entire sector when measuring effectiveness. If you want to read the in depth examination of these points, check out the full article here.
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Deep Adaptation is a group dedicated to preparing for biosphere collapse. People in DAF notice that biosphere and climate disruptions are forcing people and other species to seek new ways and places to live. While all societies face collapse, racialised and Indigenous communities, and almost all non-human species, pay the earliest and highest price. The DA Forum invites participants to understand collapse from a global and historical perspective, rather than as something that has not happened yet. DA Forum participants recognise that many communities have already experienced the trauma of collapse, whether from natural causes or due to war, slavery, colonisation, or other social injustices. The International Tribunal on the Right of Nature - by GARN (Global Alliance on the Rights of Nature). Spurred by the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth that took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2009 and on the basis of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth thereby adopted, social movements, communities and academics have started to develop and implement legal instruments for the recognition of the rights of Nature, the so-called Earth Jurisprudence. Building up on the unprecedented inclusion of the Rights of Nature in the Ecuadorian Constitution and in Bolivian legal systems, and of legal actions seeking the recognition of legal personhood of endangered ecosystems, a global movement has been taking shape. First in New Zealand with the Whanganui river, and in Ecuador with the Vilcabamba river, as well as in Colombia first with Atrato river or in Bangladesh and India with the Yamuna and Ganges rivers and watersheds, have been granted legal personhood or have been recognized as living beings with their own rights, and the number is constantly growing. Furthermore a The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Rivers was also developed, and global coalitions such as the GARN (Global Alliance on the Rights of Nature) been established.
The International Tribunal on the Rights of Nature, was established by GARN and has been analyzing many cases related to ecosystems at risk and their rights, in its sessions this far. Still, it is with rivers and their rights that the drive to develop systems of law, and new categories or rights, that complement the traditional anthropocentric human rights systems with a more biocentric approach, has been spearheaded.
Our World In Data concludes that In Order to Protect the World's Wildlife We Must Improve Crop Yields. Habitat loss is causing is the greatest threat to species survival and farmland is the greatest cause of habitat loss. It is also continuing to expand.
Common failure modes:
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/quest-carbon-offsets-almost-anything-goes Some more stats on how much things are failing and poorly measured: https://kleinmanenergy.upenn.edu/news-insights/carbon-offsets-cannot-be-our-primary-solution-to-climate-change/ Some underlying forces that are not being considered from this opinion letter in Nature: https://www.nature.com/articles/484007a A great report on the issues: https://www.fern.org/fileadmin/uploads/fern/Documents/Unearned%20Credit_0.pdf And offsetting in general: https://policy.friendsoftheearth.uk/insight/dangerous-distraction-offsetting-con An ethical lens on how offsetting is fundamentally unable to work: www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8048868/ Greenpeace's take on GreenWashing: https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/golden-age-of-greenwash/ ClientEarth's response to carbon offsets: https://www.clientearth.org/latest/latest-updates/stories/the-legal-risk-of-advertising-carbon-offsets/ George Monbiot's thoughts on carbon offets: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/26/carbon-offsetting-environmental-collapse-carbon-land-grab Most Rainforest Credits are not improving anything, and carbon is 400% exaggerated by one of the 3 biggest carbon credit verifiers "Verra" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jan/18/revealed-forest-carbon-offsets-biggest-provider-worthless-verra-aoe Nature Based Solutions on carbon offset misuse: https://www.naturebasedsolutionsinitiative.org/news/on-the-misuse-of-nature-based-carbon-offsets In an interview called Where the Buffalo Go Vine Deloria (Yankton Sioux) answers what he believes is the fundamental difference between the Western and indigenous ways of life:
Biodiversity International and Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical have created a database of free interactive conservation tools.
For example: Terra-i is a near-real time monitoring system for natural vegetation degradation in the tropics. It uses satellite data and computational neural networks to detect anthropogenic changes in the vegetation cover every 16 days. Community Seedbank Handbook: This handbook updated in 2020, is a practical guide for facilitators who work in the field with farmers and their organizations on issues of seed conservation and sustainable use. It is based on participatory learning, where facilitators and learners interact actively, make use of their experience, and learn together. Lecturing is kept to a minimum. MESH calculates and maps ecosystem service supply under different landscape management scenarios. MESH has built-in scenario generation tools, multiple ecosystem service supply evaluation, visualization of output maps and automated reprogramming functionalities. Others: Tropical Forage Tool, Landscape Planning and Management Tool (LAPMAT), Evaluating Land Management Options (ELMO) Eileen found a great article from OurWorldInData on how to protect biodiversity: "To protect the world’s wildlife we must improve crop yields – especially across Africa" It's an intriguing approach. Habitat loss is the largest threat to biodiversity. Most of this loss is driven by agriculture. On our current path, researchers project that we’d need an extra 3.4 million km2 of cropland by 2050: an area the size of India and Germany combined. This would destroy habitats for hundreds if not thousands of species of mammals, birds and amphibians.
But we have opportunities to avoid this. Improving crop yields – particularly across Sub-Saharan Africa – would have a massive impact on preserving wildlife. Changing what we eat and how much we waste would also help. If we combine these actions the world would actually need less cropland than we use today. The loss of wild habitats across the world would be minimal. It is possible to feed 10 billion people a healthy, nutritious diet while increasing the space for the world’s wildlife. Tandena found an article on the current atmosphere in biodiversity economics. Finance is taking sudden interest in halting and reversing nature loss, moving to bring data and disclosures developed for climate into a murkier area. A UN convention on biodiversity is looking to establish protection of 30% of the Earth’s land and ocean by 2030.Photographer: Koichi Kamoshida/Getty Images Mossy.Earth is at it again. This time there is an old strip mine in Portugal which they are going to restore in 3 months of earth works. Planned completion: February 2023. Read about it on their website here.
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