“We use nature because she’s valuable, and we lose nature because she’s free,” comments Pavan Sukhdev in Banking Nature, which screened at the Frontline Club on Monday 2 March. Sukhdev, the CEO of Gist Advisory, is just one of the multitude of economists, analysts and activists interviewed in the film, which focuses on the commercialisation of the natural world. After the screening, director Sandrine Feydel joined the audience for an insightful discussion.

Sandrine Feydel

In Banking Nature, Feydel and co-director Denis Delestrac document how protecting the planet has become big business. Financial companies like Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan Chase now promote environmental markets to investors who buy up areas of land, largely full of endangered species, so they can sell them for ‘nature credits’. Companies whose actions harm the environment are obliged to buy credits to offset the damage that they have caused. Banking nature poses the question of whether financial markets can succeed where politics has failed.

“I can’t trust that these same financial institutions that led us to the last financial crisis, big corporations that [caused] so much damage to the environment, could be the ones who now say ‘no problem, don’t worry, we’ve learned our lesson and are now able to protect biodiversity’,” said Feydel.

Feydel spoke of her unease with the methods used by the companies working in these new environmental markets, when so many of these same tactics – speculation, insider trading, market trading – had led to the devastation of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. “This is the same logic we are facing here,” said Feydel.

Members of the audience spoke of their shock at the reality of the situation, as the film at first seems largely pro-market before revealing the devastating consequences of treating nature as a financial commodity. “A lot of what is presented as green is not. This is what the film is trying to show,” said Feydel.

Feydel also spoke of how governments have facilitated the process, enabling financiers and corporations to invest heavily in nature.

“For the companies that want to mitigate the damages they are posing the environment, [they follow] the ‘mitigation hierarchy’. First, you avoid any destruction. If you can’t, you have to minimise the impact. And at the very end, if you can’t either avoid or minimise, you have to mitigate. And this is what is really shown by corporations and governments: it’s a way of pretending that they want to protect nature,” said Feydel.

Feydel also spoke in greater depth about the actual process of mitigation in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil, where the first green stock exchange opened a year ago.

“Landowners had to keep 80% of the forest they own, they are just allowed to cut 20% of the forest, but the government found out that the law was not really enforced. So two years ago they decided to change the forestry code. And so now they say, ‘Oh you cut 60-70% of the forest you owned? It’s not a problem. You can go the stock exchange and you can buy credits from some other landowner who didn’t cut and still has 80% of his forest’,” said Feydel.

The session concluded with a question from an audience member about what role politics can play in this new market. Feydel said: “What was surprising when we made this film [was that] NGOs had no clue about these financing mechanisms. This is the new way of making profit for financial markets.”

For more information on Banking Nature and upcoming screenings, click here.

By Nicole Hunt

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors meets in Vienna on Monday, with Iran likely to be high on the agenda following last week’s report expressing increased concerns over ‘undisclosed nuclear related activities’ in the country.

Bouthaina Shaaban, political adviser to Syrian President Bashar al Assad, is in Moscow, where she is scheduled to meet with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and hold a press conference for international media. Shaaban was one of three Syrian officials slapped with sanctions by the US Treasury Department at the end of August.

The African National Congress is expected to wrap up disciplinary proceedings against controversial ANC youth leader Julius Malema on Tuesday, having recently moved the hearing from the ANC headquarters at Luthuli House to an undisclosed location in Johannesburg following violent protests last week. Malema is accused of bringing the ANC into disrepute and sowing divisions within ANC ranks after he encouraged the overthrow of Botswana’s government.

In Brussels, the OECD publishes its annual Education at a Glance report, analysing the education systems and performances in member states. For the first time, this year’s report also looks at education in Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa.

The European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg hears a complaint on Wednesday brought by four people who say they were illegally deprived of their liberty without justification while they were held in a police ‘kettle’ during the 2001 May Day protests in London.

In New York, the UN Security Council holds a debate on drought-stricken Somalia, where security issues have compounded problems as aid struggles to get into the country and people struggle to get out.

Parliamentary elections take place in Denmark on Thursday. Recent polls say Helle Thorning-Schmidt could be the country’s next Prime Minister, as her opposition Social Democrat party looks poised to win the most seats.

A court in The Hague is due to rule on Apple’s application to ban sales of Samsung’s Galaxy phones. A temporary injunction banning sales and distribution throughout much of Europe was issued on 11 August, but is not due to come into effect until 13 October.

Following debates this week in several European parliaments on new powers for the European Financial Stability Fund, European finance ministers begin a two-day meeting on Friday.

The International Criminal Court in The Hague holds a confirmation of charges hearing for Callixte Mbarushimana, a former UN employee charged with crimes against humanity and war crimes in the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2009. Mbarushimana is alleged to have been the executive secretary of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda and directly responsible for at least 32 deaths in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide while still employed by the UN, but has never been charged.

Libyan schools are scheduled to re-open on Saturday, with a brand new curriculum devoid of Gaddafi-era subjects such as the Green Book.

At the Dead Sea in Israel, photographer Spencer Turnick stages another mass nude photoshoot, hoping to bring awareness to the fact that the famously salty lake is drying up.

The week wraps up with state elections in Berlin, the sixth in Germany this year. The regional elections have generally proven disastrous for Angela Merkel’s CDU party, which has suffered losses country-wide to the Social Democrats, a trend that many expect to continue into the 2013 federal election.