Howard E. Woodin Environmental Studies Colloquium Series

“Exporting Extinction: How the International Financial System Constrains Biodiverse Futures” a Howard E. Woodin Environmental Studies Colloquium Series talk by Audrey Irvine-Broque, PhD Student, University of British Columbia.

For decades, policymakers have known that the world is in the midst of escalating ecological crises, including an unprecedented deterioration of the abundance and diversity of life on Earth. Yet across the planet, governments fail to meet biodiversity targets, largely because the extraction that drives biodiversity loss continues. Why?

While governments support extractive sector expansion due to a variety of domestic pressures, this research argues that structural, international pressures – to maintain foreign investment, to earn foreign exchange, to comply with international financial institutions – frequently put the pursuit of financial stability in direct conflict with ecological stability. The pressures of this system act on all states, but they are experienced unequally, such that countries with a disadvantaged position in the international financial and monetary system (e.g., those in the Global South, where the majority of the world’s biodiversity is found), confront the most limited policy autonomy to challenge extractivism. This points to the critical need for reform beyond the domestic, and for biodiversity policy which addresses underlying, political-economic drivers.

Audrey Irvine-Broque is a PhD Student in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia, where she is part of an international research team studying the political economy of biodiversity loss and conservation. Her doctoral project examines sovereign debt as a driver of ecological degradation, aiming to understand how and why efforts to address this relationship – from redistributive calls for debt forgiveness to technical efforts to “green” sovereign bonds – are becoming globally dominant, and what their material consequences will be. Her research is supported by the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation and the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship.