Paper short abstract:

A costing of a conservation basic income under various global conservation scenarios.

Paper long abstract:

Current conservation disproportionately burdens indigenous people, rural communities, and the world’s poorest populations. As policymakers finalise the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework - with the a vision of “living in harmony with nature” - pro-poor, conservation strategies are needed, aligned with delivering social justice and equity. One innovative approach is a conservation basic income (CBI), whereby all individuals in conservation-impacted communities receive unconditional payments. From a social welfare perspective, CBI could help recipients improve their living conditions, compensate for lost livelihood opportunities, provide reparations for past harms, and provide a mechanisms for redistribution of wealth from the global North; from a conservation perspective CBI could reduce dependence on extractive livelihoods and provide people with the freedom to develop other ways of relating to nature, while improving the legitimacy of conservation institutions. In this presentation we first explore the background and some promises and pitfalls of CBI. We then present results from the first attempt to estimate the cost of a global CBI, based on several spatially-explicit conservation scenarios, including: current conservation effort (i.e. populations living in existing protected areas) and proposed future conservation scenarios such as the ‘global safety net’ and ‘30x30’. We compare the resulting figures with the costs of current conservation efforts, other social spending programmes, harmful subsidies, and the benefits of conserving ecosystem services. Our results show that, if well-designed, CBI could offer a feasible mechanism for aligning conservation with social justice, to achieve a vision of living in harmony with nature for all.