Ecosystem Services
nodeMoney & Finance
Nature is being repackaged as a product to be bought and sold, with the benefits it provides turned into financial assets.
Who they are
The Global Environment Facility (GEF), which uses blended finance deals to sell ecosystem services to private equity[1].
What they do
The engine calls it a way to turn the benefits people get from nature into tradable goods.
How it works
Ecosystem services are described as a helpful concept for understanding how humans link to natural capital. But in practice, those benefits are sold to private equity through GEF blended finance deals. Documents like Natural Capital Accounting and Ecosystem Service Valuation support this. A related entity, the Natural Asset Company, licenses ecosystem services and floats on the stock market via an IPO. This does not mean such companies are created by the CBD or that they own the land outright.
Why it matters
It shows how the language of nature's benefits can be used to create financial products, turning ecosystems into sources of profit.
The engine's record — word for word
The corpus records: "Those benefits gained are obviously ‘ ecosystem services ’, sold to private equity through GEF blended finance deals." It is presented publicly as: "‘ Ecosystem services are a conceptual device that is helpful in understanding the transformations that link humans to natural capital by making a distinction between the natural capital assets that give rise to a flow of benefits and a particular aspect of human well-being ‘" Documents named in the corpus: Ecohealth Approach; Ecosystem Service Valuation; Natural Capital Accounting; Ecosystem Approach; Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework; Global Assessment Report of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Cross-sourced to en.wikipedia.org, gov.uk, ncbi.nlm.nih.gov — documents cited by the corpus and retrieved independently of it.
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