“Green Finance” Promises to Save the Planet. It’s Doing the Opposite

Rolando Zumba, a gentle fifty-nine-year-old, wept through an Associated Press interview as he described the displacement of his people and their traditional lands to make way for a giant carbon offset project. His own ability to hunt disappeared when rangers in Peru’s Cordillera Azul National Park—a spectacular 13,500-kilometre sweep of Amazon rainforest, mountains, and waterfalls—confiscated his hunting rifles. The act ended self-sufficiency for his Kichwa tribe on its ancestral land, ensuring poverty and hunger for his people.

In a December 2022 exposé, the news agency reported that this project was flawed from the beginning. The carbon credit program was set up in 2008 to “offset” the carbon footprint of Shell and TotalEnergies, which purchased blocks of the park, allowing them to claim more than 28 million “credits,” meaning they were theoretically offsetting that much CO2. The project brought in so much money, it covered around 90 percent of the operating expenses of the park and was supposed to be used for forest protection and reforestation. But the AP exposé found that not only did the companies exaggerate the credits earned, tree cover loss in the park also dramatically increased due to increased deforestation.

The market approach to nature is now deeply entrenched in many governments and international institutions, and trading in nature’s “assets” is a huge business. Most people around the world know little or nothing about this fast-moving development. But its reach is astounding.

The financialization of nature is modelled on the same economic logic that promotes investments that attempt to profit from the fluctuations in the market value of assets. Nature-based finance zeroes in on climate change and other environmental crises. Every firestorm, hurricane, and flood presents an opportunity for experts in risk forecasting to advise on the cleanup and recovery technologies that will be needed. And governments give large tax breaks and other incentives to the corporations, banks, and asset management companies that use “green” funds to underwrite such businesses.

Green finance is part of the doctrine of neoliberal capitalism, which holds that the market can resolve almost all social, economic, and political problems, including the climate crisis, better than governments.

In many ways, well-meaning public opinion is stoking this development. The private sector has been the beneficiary of an increasingly informed global public demanding that something be done to confront the climate and other environmental crises. There is a deep desire on the part of many individuals and institutional investors, such as pension funds, university endowments, and nonprofits, to invest ethically, with a strong emphasis on protecting nature and promoting nature-friendly technology. Four in five Canadians “of all political stripes” want stronger government action to protect forests and wildlife, for instance. So it is no surprise that the same individuals and institutions asking their governments to step up will seek out environmentally ethical ways to invest their money.

They believe it is time the economy was geared to protecting nature (as do we all) but perhaps have not yet been exposed to the ways in which many corporations are using the climate crisis and the financialization of nature as an opportunity to greenwash their operations.

And that poses a serious problem.

Sustainability-linked stocks and bonds are appealing to ethical investors, and companies are competing for those funds by wrapping themselves in promises to be part of the climate solution. Green financing serves the purpose of allowing people to feel good about investing in the market while not challenging the deep flaws in the increasingly deregulated market economy and the part it plays in nature’s destruction. Investments in funds marketed as ESG (environmental, social, and governance), three areas identified for evaluating “good” corporate behaviour, are skyrocketing as companies and asset managers compete to look environmentally responsible.

Key to establishing nature-based markets is collecting data on nature—the forests, fields, wetlands, and wildlife that make up our natural world. The official term used is “natural capital accounting,” language reminiscent of financial accounting.

The pressure is on the Canadian government to measure and price its vast, biodiverse natural wealth. In 2024, Canada created a Census of Environment, based on the United Nations’ accounting system, to provide “measures of ecosystem services such as food, clean air, clean water, carbon storage, wildlife habitat, and recreational opportunities.” Already, dozens of towns and cities have adopted nature-based accounting in their financial plans, and in 2025, the University of Waterloo, working with KPMG, one of the largest professional accounting firms in the world, created a guide to standardize the practice across the country.

In 2024, the United States, Canada, and Australia signed the Partnership on Cooperation on National Capital Accounting and Environmental Economic Accounting, recognizing that “natural resources are capital assets critical for economic growth and prosperity” and pledging to link “natural capital accounts” to “national economic accounts.”

Carbon markets are the most visible form of green finance and have been around for decades. They are now the largest class of environmental trading markets in the world in terms of both volume and value. Essentially, offsetting is a carbon-trading mechanism that allows corporations to “compensate” for their greenhouse gas emissions—and continue to pollute—by investing in projects that allegedly reduce emissions elsewhere. One UN-issued carbon credit represents an emissions reduction or removal of one metric tonne of greenhouse gases somewhere. When the company invests in a carbon-offsetting project, it receives a credit that can then be traded.

That carbon gravy train keeps making profits for corporations. In 2024, 43 percent of Tesla’s net income came from selling carbon credits to other fossil fuel carmakers that had failed to produce sustainable vehicles in line with US and European Union environmental goals, earning $2.8 billion (US) for Elon Musk. Because Tesla sells its credits to other automakers, even consumers who do not want to support Musk and his politics by buying his cars can still be indirectly lining his pockets, reported the investigative journal Follow the Money in 2025. Tesla made more than $9.4 billion (US) on carbon offsets between 2020 and 2025.

In October 2024, sixty renowned scientists from around the world warned that carbon offsets used by corporations are not cutting emissions overall and, in fact, are hindering the energy transition. They called on the world to take what they call the “real zero” pledge in place of “net zero,” which they call a “counting game.”

Not only does the carbon market continue to grow, so does Big Oil. After posting record profits in 2022, the big energy companies had another banner year in 2023—the five biggest (Shell, BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and TotalEnergies) paying their shareholders an unprecedented $111 billion (US). The Union of Concerned Scientists notes that these record profits came as people around the world suffered billions in damage from climate disasters—damage that governments and communities had to clean up.

Federal and provincial governments in Canada are subsidizing the Alberta tar sands—the world’s largest and, according to National Geographic, dirtiest fossil fuel project—by at least $13 billion (US) a year, reported Canadian NGO Environmental Defence in 2024. Overall, Canadian subsidies to the oil and gas sector, including financing for the Trans Mountain pipeline project, topped $20 billion (US) in 2024, reported Yahoo Finance. In March 2025, Canada’s National Observer reported that 180 oil and gas companies plan to spend more than $425 billion (US) in developing new oil and gas fields in the next decade, and annual investments in Canadian energy production are expected to reach the highest levels ever recorded in Canada by 2030.

Meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow. A January 2024 report published in Science found that oil companies in the tar sands are emitting up to 6,300 percent more pollution than they have been reporting.

While it has been used in limited ways for decades in a number of countries, biodiversity offsetting, also called “nature markets” and “conservation offsets,” is a more recent manifestation at the international level than carbon offsetting. Biodiversity trading places a value on a habitat, plant, or animal, and a credit is created that can be offset or traded. This allows a company or government to continue to harm a local habitat while claiming to conserve natural assets elsewhere.

Carbon Brief, a United Kingdom–based website covering climate science and policy, says that while biodiversity-offset markets have so far escaped the intense critique that carbon offsetting has been subjected to, they are growing in prominence and were included as one of the ways to finance a global deal for nature approved at the Biodiversity COP15.

Like carbon offsets, explains Carbon Brief, biodiversity offsets are built around the idea of “no net loss”—the assumption that damage to ecosystems wrought by large-scale development projects can be balanced or outweighed by preserving or “producing” nature elsewhere. Unlike carbon offsets, there is currently no international marketplace for buying or selling biodiversity credits or offsets, although there is political will in France and the UK for such a market.

A major target of biodiversity investing is underfunded national parks and conservation areas around the world, what the UN calls “protected areas.” The protection and restoration of wild spaces is a key international commitment. Governments around the world, as well as the UN and the World Bank, have jumped on this bandwagon with enthusiasm, with global initiatives such as 30 x 30, whereby governments pledge to designate 30 percent of their land and oceans as protected areas by 2030.

Launched in 2020 by the UN High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, its stated purpose is to expand nature conservation and biodiversity protection to mitigate climate change. Member countries committed $5 billion (US) to the project, and as of 2025, 122 countries have taken the pledge, many of them with very good intentions.

Where can nations find the funding? Managing national parks and conservation areas is expensive for all governments, especially for many in the Global South. There is an increasing trend within the management of parks to form relationships with the private sector, reported Mongabay in 2016. Public–private partnerships use private money to fund national parks and other protected areas, in many cases commercializing them to pay off the vital services needed for maintenance services. While the government still owns the actual land, a private consortium runs it.

Robert Williams, a law professor and faculty chair of the Indigenous Peoples Law and Policy program at the University of Arizona, warns that the 30 x 30 project is being used to displace Indigenous peoples in many communities. In the name of rewilding nature and creating “protected areas,” millions are at risk.

“Indeed, an estimated 476 million Indigenous People dwell on lands that are home to 80 percent of the world’s biodiversity. When governments decide that nature conservation and potential revenue from it take priority over existing human activities, too often they resort to eviction, destruction of agricultural fields, and confiscation of livestock, sometimes through stupefying violence, to get residents off the land.”

He cites tiger preserves in India that have displaced Adivasi people to attract foreign tourists, and the planned removal of nearly 100,000 Maasai people from Tanzania’s Ngorongoro Conservation Area to increase the number of tourists who come to see the annual Great Migration.

Survival International calls the use of biodiversity and carbon offsetting in protected areas “blood carbon” and says they are part of a new move to commodify nature. “These projects put a price on nature, treating Indigenous and local communities’ lands as a carbon stock to be exchanged in the market so polluters can keep polluting, the conservation industry can get its hands on billions of dollars, and speculators can profit. . . . Carbon colonialism is killing people and the planet.”

Worryingly, a 2021 World Bank blog promotes the use of national public parks—protected areas—around the world to meet the 30 x 30 pledge. While public parks do, of course, count in the 30 x 30 goal, the blog authors have something else in mind. They recommend shifting the ownership of these parks from governments to a public–private partnership model, where the government still technically owns the land, but its use is privatized. To pay for the pledge, the bank would turn to public pension funds so large they now, in effect, “own a slice of the global economy,” and public companies, often referred to as “sovereign wealth funds,” that governments invest in on behalf of their citizens.

As of 2021, the global top ten public pension funds and the global top ten sovereign wealth funds controlled $15 trillion (US) in assets. Together, they could fund natural asset companies that would invest in the newly privatized parks. Note that this model would take public funds, public parks, and protected areas funded by the public and governments and protected by government regulations and hand them over to the service of private capital and the control of the market.

Billions of people who live in urban centres around the world depend on state parks and protected areas to experience nature. If these protected areas are sold to private interests in the name of conservation, billions could lose their only access to natural ecosystems, forests, lakes, and rivers.

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In fall 2021, the New York Stock Exchange partnered with Intrinsic Exchange Group to open up investment opportunities in “nature’s economy” by creating a “new kind of listing vehicle”—natural asset companies. Fortune explains, “Using NACs, governments, farmers, and other owners of natural assets will be able to form a specialized corporation that holds the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration, or clean water. Then the company will tap the U.S. public markets by way of the NYSE like any other entity would.”

Big energy, mining, and logging companies were excited about what would have been the largest attack on public US lands and water in modern American history. Initially, in its summer 2025 “big, beautiful” bill, the Donald Trump administration proposed to lease 2 million acres of public lands—an area larger than Texas and California combined—to the private sector. “Expanding oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters through mandated lease sales would turn parks, coasts, wildlife refuges, and sacred landscapes into drilling and mining zones,” said the non-partisan policy institute Center for American Progress. Strong opposition from many quarters, including the outdoor recreation industry, caused senate Republicans to remove this provision from the bill. But Americans who care about their public parks and wildlife are on notice that the government might try again at some future time.

Canada is also preparing biodiversity-offsetting legislation, sounding alarm bells for environmental organizations. Greenpeace Canada says the draft legislation “flies in the face” of the constructive role Canada has played in international biodiversity meetings, choosing now to follow a “misguided approach” that will only exacerbate the biodiversity crisis. Greenpeace is particularly concerned with plans for “habitat banking,” as in the UK: “This opens up the possibility of a market-based system wherein wealthy developers or corporations simply pay a fee in order to destroy biodiversity—a pay-to-slay mechanism.”

In spite of such concerns, investors see Canada, with its biodiversity wealth, as a new and lucrative frontier. In February 2025, the Ottawa-based Nature Investment Hub released a survey claiming that investors are “keen” to grow their nature conservation investments in Canada. The sixty respondents, including investment firms, pensions funds, foundations and banks, represent over $180 billion (US) in assets.

In effect, what biodiversity offsetting achieves is this: it outsources nature protection to the market, relieves governments of environmental responsibility, allows corporations to continue to destroy the natural world, and perpetuates colonial inequities, allowing countries and corporations of the Global North to offshore their biodiversity conservation to cheap areas of the Global South.

Adapted and excerpted, with permission, from Earth for Sale: The Fight to Stop the Last Plunder of the Planet by Maude Barlow, published by ECW Press, 2026.