Developing Countries Turn to Each Other for Conservation

Noah Seelam/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesExecutive secretary for the Convention on Biological Diversity, Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, left, India's minister of environment and forests, Jayanthi Natarajan, center, and South Korea's vice minister of environment, Jongsoo Yoon, at the Convention on Biological Diversity in Hyderabad.

When Prime Minister Manmohan Singh pledged money for helping developing countries meet conservation g oals at the United Nations summit on biodiversity last week, conservationists and policymakers applauded the promise.

Not so much for the amount â€" which, at $50 million for two years, was just a fraction of total global spending on biodiversity â€" but for what it meant in a world where conserving nature is an activity largely financed by the West.

“That's a great initiative,” said Lasse Gustavsson, conservation director of the World Wide Fund for Nature. “It won't go far, but you're now seeing this tendency for strong leadership on conservation from the emerging economies.”

After intense negotiations at the 11th convention on biodiversity, which came to a close early on Saturday in Hyderabad, rich countries finally agreed to double their contributions to conservation projects by 2015. But on the meeting's sidelines, top government officials and environmentalists discussed new ways in which developing nations could pre serve their natural habitats. According to government officials, activists and other people involved in the negotiations, many developing countries went home poised for more cooperative efforts like Mr. Singh's pledge.

With developed countries mired in the global economic slowdown, placing tighter control on their budgets, developing countries are increasingly turning to new sources of financing to protect the environment. As emerging economies like India, China and Brazil become wealthier and more confident, there has been a rise in so-called South-South cooperation, in which developing countries provide each other economic and technical assistance.

“We now live in a flat, multipolar world where you're starting to see the middle-income countries become international donors,” said Rachel Kyte, vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank. At this convention, she said, “a level of practicality influenced the negotiations.”

In addition to Mr. Singh's pledge, South Korea, which will host the next round of biodiversity talks in 2014, has put $40 million in a fund to help developing countries invest in being green. The Brazilian Development Bank, the world's largest development bank, maintains a $120 million fund to fight deforestation in the Amazon and finances rainforest protection around the world. China has set up programs to train African scientists in conserving biodiversity. Dozens of other regional efforts have sprouted across Latin America, Africa and Asia.

These investments are a fraction of what developed countries have pledged for protecting biodiversity in developing countries, which will reach about $10 billion annually by 2015, and are even slighter compared to the estimated $80 billion to $200 billion it will cost per year to curb the loss of the world's biodiversity. (Even the Brazilian Development Bank's Amazon fund is financed largely by Norway.)

Still, convention delegates sai d these pledges are a harbinger of a future in which larger developing countries, where conservation often takes a back seat to goals like poverty reduction, play a more active role in saving the environment â€" not just at home, but also abroad.

“The world was always seen as a North-South divide,” said one Indian negotiator, who requested anonymity because the talks are confidential. “Now you are talking about developing countries themselves helping out. South-South cooperation was never institutionalized around biodiversity before â€" that's the symbolism of India's pledge. $50 million may not seem like a lot of money, but it helps a country like Guatemala.”

To satisfy their need for energy and raw materials, emerging nations have sent cheap technology and aid to their less-developed counterparts since the 1990s. Trade between developing countries remained a bright spot during the global financial crisis â€" as imports and exports slowed down across the West, countries in the south stepped up to fill the gap.

Negotiators said they now expected to see even more South-South cooperation in financing conservation. Much of the world's biodiversity is located in developing countries, where large sections of the population still depend directly on forests and wetlands for survival. Developing countries can benefit, the negotiators said, from their common ground in balancing the pressures on their environment with the pressure to reduce poverty.

“It's becoming increasingly more difficult for the North to commit to providing resources, so more South-South cooperation is inevitable,” said Geoffrey Wahungu, head of the Kenyan delegation to the summit. “Developing countries would like to look at natural resources as natural capital, so you have to look at like-minded development partners to share experiences about cutting costs and using technology in conservation.”

Recently a few nations have looked at ways to integrate their spending on development with the conservation of nature. An August 2012 study by the Indian government found that it already spent nearly $1 billion per year on development programs that had environmental benefits but that there was much more scope to make poverty-reduction programs greener.

“What is happening right now is that funds are being diverted from poverty alleviation to look at forests,” said Damodaran Appukutta, the study's author. “So you have to have a complete paradigm change in the way of looking at conservation, where protected biodiversity is integrated into development.”

But for all the hopes of future South-South cooperation, most developing countries aren't ready to fully take over the reins from the West.

“If we forgo the economic benefits that come from not using our resources sustainably, then developed countries also have an obligation to contribute,” said Mr. Wahungu, the Kenyan delegate.

Mr. Gus tavson, the W.W.F. conservation director, said, “We want to see that South-South cooperation is strengthened, but not necessarily at the expense of the already developed economies taking the issue as seriously as everybody else.”

There is also the question of how developing countries can lead on international conservation efforts, said Pavan Sukhdev, special adviser to the United Nations Environment Program, while ecosystems at home are unaccountably damaged during mining and other big-budget development projects.

“Given that corporate interests determine economic direction and resource use, we have to be careful that the demand for profits doesn't outweigh the need for conserving nature in India,” said Mr. Sukhdev.

European delegates accused large countries like China and Brazil of giving lip service to South-South cooperation while continuing to receive contributions from Western countries.

“Some of the countries that receive funding have much larger economies than most of the donor countries,” said Ines Verleye, a top delegate for the European Union. “The irony is that these are countries that talk about South-South cooperation, and yet they're the biggest recipients of aid and take it from the least developing countries that really need it.”

In all likelihood, any fundamental shift in who leads the world's conservation efforts will take time. Still, economic and environmental experts at the convention saw a new trend emerging from the changing global landscape.

“People know that the progress being made in these global conferences just isn't fast enough,” said Ms. Kyte of the World Bank, “and they're not waiting.”