The great tragedy of climate and biodiversity finance is that those who understand it most have their noses to the grindstone, while those who understand it least have their mouths to the megaphone.

This has always been the case, but it spun out of control once mainstream media belatedly awoke to the enormity of the climate challenge in 2018. Since then, the quantity of news, views, and “research” on climate and biodiversity finance has surged while the quality has plummeted.

This is true in all spheres of climate and biodiversity finance, but especially in coverage of market-based mechanisms.

These represent a small component of the envisioned solutions, but they enjoy broad support within the scientific and environmental communities. They’ve also evolved over several decades, and they’ve succeeded where traditional aid and philanthropy have failed.

Nonetheless, a small gaggle of outliers and ideologues has stolen a page from the science-denier handbook to convince a critical mass of malleable reporters that the opposite is true.

Proponents have failed to counter the disinformation for the same reason climate scientists failed to counter the science denial movement that delayed action on climate change for decades.

The sad fact is that half-truths, innuendo, and cherry-picked findings are difficult to counter in a populace with little understanding of the real debate. 

It doesn’t help that market mechanisms are more like poker than chess and that deforestation isn’t a puzzle book with an answer key in the back. It’s a wicked problem with no simple solutions, and solutions that work tend to reflect the concurrent views of most experts and not the pet theories of outlier academics. 

Existing market mechanisms were developed with the best available science under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and they were implemented on the principle of constant improvement. By its nature, this approach pushes its shortcomings into the public eye where honest inquirers look for ways to improve them.

Tragically, unscrupulous opponents use this same strength to undermine trust in the process — sometimes to build their own brand and other times because they simply don’t like markets.

Contrary to what many have written about me, I am not fervently pro-market. I believe the market has its place, and I believe in the process of constant improvement, as well as the folly of holding out for imagined states of perfection. 

I’m also anally committed to setting records straight when I see them being spun backward, and no record has been more distortively spun than that on climate and biodiversity finance. 

Opponents bear most of the responsibility for that, but opponents have also spent decades hiding from the false narrative or pushing a simplistic — and equally false — narrative of their own.

I’m devoted to giving you an accurate narrative — one you’ll find is mostly positive but remains nonetheless as flawed as our understanding of reality itself.

I’ll use this page to gradually build up trusted resources, but for now, I invite you to join the Bionic Planet LinkedIn group and stay tuned for future developments.

Steve Zwick

Bionic Planet