Towards transformative justice in conservation finance: The case for Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC)

This article outlines the case for a Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC): a novel mechanism for funding biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation activities. Over the past 150 years, the international conservation movement has successfully protected endangered species in many places throughout the world (Langhammer et al. 2024). Yet it currently struggles to confront rapidly accelerating global biodiversity loss, which some have labelled the sixth extinction crisis (WWF 2024). This biodiversity crisis is compounded by the growing impacts of anthropogenic climate change. Conservation and climate policy have thus become increasingly conjoined (Locke et al. 2021). At the same time, however, there is growing recognition that dominant conservation approaches, centred mainly on creation and enforcement of protected areas (PAs) and other area-based measures, have produced a range of social injustices, including widespread displacement or marginalization of those living in or near conservation-critical spaces (Dowie 2011; Tauli-Corpuz et al 2020). Growing economic inequality throughout the world is a documented threat to biodiversity (Mikkelson et al. 2007). Yet rather than redressing this inequality, conservation has unfortunately often contributed to it by further marginalizing the rural poor who most directly rely on biodiversity for their livelihoods and who are most negatively impacted by climate change (Turner et al. 2012). (...)