The Environmental Impacts of International Finance Corporation Lending and Proposals for Reform: A Case Study of Conservation and Oil Development in the Guatemalan Petén

This Article presents a case study of lending by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private-sector lending arm of the World Bank Group, in the oil and gas sector in Guatemala. The case study emphasizes the need for additional environmental reform at IFC. With two separate loans in 1994 and 1996, IFC supported the activities of a small international oil company that was operating within a national park in the northern Guatemalan Petdn, an area of rich tropical forests and globally important wetlands. The company\u27s operations had been grandfathered in to the park upon its creation in 1990. Funding from IFC was used to construct a pipeline from the oil field in the park to a refinery outside of the park. The crux of the authors\u27 findings is that the pipeline should have been constructed to follow the path of an existing road, rather than along the chosen route that crosses significant stretches of primary tropical forest and that opened a new right-of-way into a park already facing continued pressure from colonization. The authors conclude that a stronger set of IFC lending policies, combined with a better environmental impact assessment and more extensive public consultation, would have led to a less environmentally damaging outcome. Although the authors acknowledge the complex questions about the role of governments, development agencies, the private sector, conservation organizations, and local communities raised by this issue, they focus on the narrow subject of IFC\u27s role in this matter, stressing the need for a reform agenda at that institution

Policy options for the world’s primary forests in multilateral environmental agreements

We identify policies that would provide a solid foundation in key international negotiations to ensure that primary forests persist into the 21st Century. A novel compilation of primary forest cover and other data revealed that protection of primary forests is a matter of global concern being equally distributed between developed and developing countries. Almost all (98%) of primary forest is found within 25 countries with around half in five developed ones (USA, Canada, Russia, Australia, and NZ). Only approximate to 22% of primary forest is found in IUCN Protected Areas Categories I-VI, which is approximately 5% of preagriculture natural forest cover. Rates of deforestation and forest degradation are rapid and extensive, and the long-term integrity of primary forest cannot be assumed. We recommend four new actions that could be included in climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable development negotiations: (1) recognize primary forests as a matter of global concern within international negotiations; (2) incorporate primary forests into environmental accounting; (3) prioritize the principle of avoided loss; and (4) universally accept the important role of indigenous and community conserved areas. In the absence of specific policies for primary forest protection, their unique biodiversity values and ecosystem services will continue to erode

Great Apes and Biodiversity Offset Projects in Africa: The Case for National Offset Strategies

The development and private sectors are increasingly considering “biodiversity offsets” as a strategy to compensate for their negative impacts on biodiversity, including impacts on great apes and their habitats in Africa. In the absence of national offset policies in sub-Saharan Africa, offset design and implementation are guided by company internal standards, lending bank standards or international best practice principles. We examine four projects in Africa that are seeking to compensate for their negative impacts on great ape populations. Our assessment of these projects reveals that not all apply or implement best practices, and that there is little standardization in the methods used to measure losses and gains in species numbers. Even if they were to follow currently accepted best-practice principles, we find that these actions may still fail to contribute to conservation objectives over the long term. We advocate for an alternative approach in which biodiversity offset and compensation projects are designed and implemented as part of a National Offset Strategy that (1) takes into account the cumulative impacts of development in individual countries, (2) identifies priority offset sites, (3) promotes aggregated offsets, and (4) integrates biodiversity offset and compensation projects with national biodiversity conservation objectives. We also propose supplementary principles necessary for biodiversity offsets to contribute to great ape conservation in Africa. Caution should still be exercised, however, with regard to offsets until further field-based evidence of their effectiveness is available

Mature and old-growth forests contribute to large-scale conservation targets in the conterminous United States

Mature and old-growth forests (MOG) of the conterminous United States collectively support exceptional levels of biodiversity but have declined substantially from logging and development. National-scale proposals to protect 30 and 50% of all lands and waters are useful in assessing MOG conservation targets given the precarious status of these forests. We present the first coast to coast spatially explicit MOG assessment based on three structural development measures—canopy height, canopy cover, and above-ground living biomass to assess relative maturity. MOG were displayed by major forest types (n = 22), landownerships (federal, state, private, and tribal), and Gap Analysis Project (GAP) management status overlaid on the NatureServe’s Red-listed Ecosystems and species, above-ground living biomass, and drinking water source areas. MOG total ∼67.2 M ha (35.9%) of all forest structural classes and were scattered across 8 regions with most in western regions. All federal lands combined represented the greatest (35%) concentrations of MOG, ∼92% of which is on national forest lands with ∼9% on Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and ∼3% on national park lands (totals do not sum to 100% due to minor mapping errors in the datasets). MOG on national forest lands supported the highest concentration of conservation values. However, national forests and BLM lands did not meet lower bound (30%) targets with only ∼24% of MOG in GAP1,2 (5.9 M ha) protection status. The vast majority (76%, 20.8 M ha) of MOG on federal lands that store 10.64 Gt CO2 (e) are vulnerable to logging (GAP3). If federal MOG are logged over a decade, and half their carbon stock emitted, there would be an estimated 0.5 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 by 2030, which is equivalent to ∼9% of United States total annual emissions. We recommend upper bound (100%) protection of federal MOG, including elevating the conservation status of Inventoried Roadless Areas. This would avoid substantial CO2 emissions while allowing ongoing carbon sequestration to act as natural climate solutions to aid compliance with the Paris Climate Agreement and presidential executive orders on MOG and 30% of all lands and waters in protection by 2030. On non-federal lands, which have fewer MOG, regulatory improvements and conservation incentives are needed.</p

Gaps and opportunities for the World Heritage Convention to contribute to global wilderness conservation

Wilderness areas are ecologically intact landscapes predominantly free of human uses, especially industrial-scale activities that result in substantial biophysical disturbance. This definition does not exclude land and resource use by local communities who depend on such areas for subsistence and bio-cultural connections. Wilderness areas are important for biodiversity conservation and sustain key ecological processes and ecosystem services that underpin planetary life-support systems. Despite these widely recognized benefits and values of wilderness, they are insufficiently protected and are consequently being rapidly eroded. There are increasing calls for multilateral environmental agreements to make a greater and more systematic contribution to wilderness conservation before it is too late. We created a global map of remaining terrestrial wilderness following the established last-of-the-wild method, which identifies the 10% of areas with the lowest human pressure within each of Earth's 62 biogeographic realms and identifies the 10 largest contiguous areas and all contiguous areas >10,000 km2. We used our map to assess wilderness coverage by the World Heritage Convention and to identify gaps in coverage. We then identified large nationally designated protected areas with good wilderness coverage within these gaps. One-quarter of natural and mixed (i.e., sites of both natural and cultural value) World Heritage Sites (WHS) contained wilderness (total of 545,307 km2), which is approximately 1.8% of the world's wilderness extent. Many WHS had excellent wilderness coverage, for example, the Okavango Delta in Botswana (11,914 km2) and the Central Suriname Nature Reserve (16,029 km2). However, 22 (35%) of the world's terrestrial biorealms had no wilderness representation within WHS. We identified 840 protected areas of >500 km2 that were predominantly wilderness (>50% of their area) and represented 18 of the 22 missing biorealms. These areas offer a starting point for assessing the potential for the designation of new WHS that could help increase wilderness representation on the World Heritage list. We urge the World Heritage Convention to ensure that the ecological integrity and outstanding universal value of existing WHS with wilderness values are preserved.JRC.D.6-Knowledge for Sustainable Development and Food Securit

Sites in Africa where private sector or development projects are seeking to use offsets and compensation projects to counterbalance residual negative impacts to great apes and their habitat.

<p>Sites include (1) the Simandou Project in the Republic of Guinea, (2) the Global Alumina Project (GAP) in the Republic of Guinea, (3) the Bumbuna Hydroelectric Project (BHP) in Sierra Leone, and (4) the Lom Pangar Dam in the Republic of Cameroon.</p