Corporate Influence At UN Summits Delivering A One-two Punch To Our Future, Briefing Says

21 May 2021—The Global Forest Coalition is releasing tomorrow, on the International Day of Biological Diversity, a briefing called “Corporate Contagion: How the private sector is capturing the UN Food, Biodiversity and Climate Summits” that details the increasing sway of private actors over the policy-making spaces that are shaping our future. (En español aquí)

Three big UN summits are coming up on food, biodiversity and the climate (the Food Systems Summit scheduled for September, the CBD COP15 scheduled for October, and UNFCCC COP26 scheduled for November), and the private sector will have a major influence at all of them, making 2021 a dangerous year for the corporate takeover of multilateral processes. With civil society participation limited by the COVID-19 pandemic, campaigners fear that several extremely harmful policy outcomes are being cooked up.

“Due to corporate capture, the outcomes of these UN processes are no longer reflecting the rights and public interests of rightsholder groups like women, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, but the commercial interests of large corporations and philanthrocapitalists like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.”says Simone Lovera, executive director of GFC, a coalition of 117 NGOs, women’s groups and Indigenous Peoples’ Organizations aiming for rights-based forest policies.

The Biodiversity Conference is supposed to produce a Global Biodiversity Framework to halt biodiversity loss, but the briefing points out that the draft text does not reflect the pathways to transformative change needed to achieve this. Instead, it would allow the corporations responsible for destroying biodiversity to maintain business-as-usual and simply offset harmful projects with often equally harmful fortress conservation

The UN Food Systems Summit is co-organized by the World Economic Forum (WEF), which promotes the interests of the world's largest corporations, and these corporations, along with corporate philanthropies, will have a powerful presence. The briefing suggests that these private actors are undermining multilateral efforts to govern food systems in the public interest and promote more sustainable, plant-based diets, and that they are promoting dangerous technologies instead.

Lastly, the Climate Conference is closely tied to corporations whose interests are squarely opposed to solving the climate crisis. COP26 will see final talks on Article 6.2 of the Paris Agreement, a carbon trading policy that Shell helped draft, and GFC says that if corporations have their way, it will allow for large-scale emissions trading and offsetting under so-called “Net Zero” approaches, a truly disastrous outcome for the climate.

GFC warns that unless the corporate capture of the UN through corporate philanthropism and other forms of public-private partnerships is halted and reversed, 2021 will be an especially devastating year for sustainable food systems, biodiversity and the climate.

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