By Rich Bindell, senior writer and blogger at Food & Water Watch
The path to a green economy is dotted with many mirages. Eco-compensation is one of them. World Resources Institute (WRI) describes eco-compensation as if it’s a just reward to companies for providing sustainable solutions to environmental problems, but it really just encourages business as usual for big polluters. It doesn’t solve the problem of poor water quality. In fact, it allows companies to profit while they continue to compromise our resources. It’s market-based pollution trading.
WRI uses a water quality trading market as an example of a program that provides a cost-effective solution for agricultural contamination. But the program relies on the good actors to give their earned credits to bad actors, who generally keep on polluting.
This is basically just another way for corporate polluters to buy their way into the green economy. This type of program doesn’t change behavior—polluting—so much as it gives companies an opportunity to manipulate the system and grants them a platform from which they can tout their faux version of environmental stewardship. It some cases, this pollution-trading can even lead to privatization of public water sources.
China faces a potential crisis from lack of safe drinking water, particularly in rural areas, due to pollution from chemical and fertilizer run-off from farms. Instead of creating and enforcing regulations that restrict or eliminate the use of contaminants that cause pollutant run-off, eco-compensation creates a market for it.
Buying credits to keep on polluting (or to pollute even more) does not move us forward in the age of the green economy. In fact, the term “green economy” almost seems like it was created by those who wish to benefit financially from the value of our dwindling natural resources.
Rich Bindell is a senior writer and blogger at Food & Water Watch. Rich earned his B.A. in communications and rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh and has previously worked on environmental issues, including providing communications assistance to the land-recycling program for the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection.
