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universal basic income
Reimagining Conservation Post-Cop16: The Case for a Universal Basic Income
The recent COP16 underscored the need for inclusive conservation strategies in Latin America, where social conflicts and environmental vulnerabilities intersect. A Universal Basic Income could be the answer.
Nov 13, 2024
The recent 16th Conference of Parties (COP16) to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP16, has highlighted the urgent need to rethink conservation strategies, particularly in Latin America, where the convergence of social conflict and environmental vulnerability creates a complex, high-stakes landscape.
The global environmental crisis, manifesting in the accelerated loss of biodiversity, is exacerbated by deep socio-economic inequalities. Yet communities most affected by environmental degradation are often those that can play a crucial role in its protection. Traditional approaches are no longer sufficient; conservation efforts must be both innovative and inclusive. Therefore, it is vital that communities are included in the formulation of policies that impact their lives. And to take an active role in conservation, they require support through financing mechanisms tailored to their specific needs.
The intersection of conservation and social justice is not merely an ideal; it is an urgent necessity that we must embrace to achieve a sustainable future for all.
In this regard, Universal Basic Income (UBI) emerges as an essential tool for empowering vulnerable communities and promoting equitable conservation strategies. It is not merely about mitigating environmental impacts; these actions also strengthen community resilience and contribute to peace, helping to prevent conflicts. However, the true potential of UBI is only fully realized when supported by financing mechanisms such as Cap and Share.
A Model of Climate Justice
The Cap and Share model generates socio-economic equality through emission reductions and biodiversity protection. And by redirecting these resources towards UBI, we can create a virtuous cycle in which vulnerable communities benefit directly from conservation actions.
Cap and Share enables communities to receive regular, unconditional payments, providing them with crucial financial security. This not only alleviates pressure on natural resources but also facilitates active community participation in the conservation of their surroundings. UBI is not simply economic assistance; it is a model of climate justice that ensures those most affected by climate change receive direct support, empowering them to become agents of change.
Colombia Pilot Project
In Colombia, where the intersection of urgent environmental challenges and violent conflict is particularly evident, a pilot project implementing UBI could be pivotal. This initiative would provide regular income to affected communities, offering them economic relief and the opportunity to engage in conservation practices. Such a project would not only generate immediate benefits for the communities involved but also serve as a vital case study for scaling UBI initiatives across similar contexts. The evidence gathered from this pilot could demonstrate the effectiveness of UBI in reducing poverty, enhancing food security, and fostering peaceful sustainable practices, thereby making a compelling case for broader implementation.
Global evidence suggests that regular income from UBI can have significant positive effects on food security and community autonomy. Communities receiving cash transfers can diversify their income sources and improve their agricultural practices, thereby reducing pressure on ecosystems. In Colombia, this could mean a reduction in practices that contribute to deforestation, as communities empowered by financial security are more likely to invest in sustainable land management.
Armed conflict in Colombia has left deep scars on the country’s social and environmental fabric. Displaced communities and areas of high ecological degradation serve as constant reminders of the interconnectedness of social and environmental issues. Restoring the environment and reducing inequalities must be tackled together to achieve lasting peace. Implementing UBI, supported by Cap and Share, could be a crucial step toward rebuilding the relationship between communities and nature, creating a foundation for sustainable development.
A Sustainable and Equitable Future
As we look forward, it is essential that the conversation around inclusive financing does not stall. Every dollar allocated to conservation should be seen as an investment in the communities that care for our most precious ecosystems. Both international and national actors must recognise the importance of these initiatives and collaborate to ensure that vulnerable communities have access to the resources they need.
The implementation of UBI, alongside mechanisms like Cap and Share, not only offers an economic solution but also addresses the root causes of social and environmental injustice. In doing so, we not only protect biodiversity and ecosystems but also build more just and resilient societies, capable of facing present and future challenges. The intersection of conservation and social justice is not merely an ideal; it is an urgent necessity that we must embrace to achieve a sustainable future for all.
Concluding this chapter of COP16, it is clear that the path to effective conservation must be inclusive. Promoting dialogue around financing mechanisms that empower vulnerable communities is essential to ensure that conservation strategies are fair and effective. Only by doing so can we strengthen the resilience of our communities and contribute to a more equitable world, where nature and humanity coexist in harmony. A pilot project in Colombia can provide the necessary evidence to scale these initiatives, offering a replicable model on a larger scale, which can be advocated in upcoming scenarios such as COP29 and COP30.
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A Simple Safety Net Could Keep People Like Me out of Prison
When those facing the most systemic barriers receive sufficient income support, then economic security, thriving, and freedom are the result.
Aug 13, 2024
I received a 60-year prison sentence for a murder I didn’t commit. After 25 years of fighting this injustice, I was exonerated.
I’ve learned some hard lessons about our criminal justice system. I’ve also learned how simple safety net policies—like a modest guaranteed base income or no-strings-attached child allowance—could have kept millions of struggling young people like me out of trouble.
I had a good childhood in Flint, Michigan, but we were poor and opportunities were few. My parents were loving and supportive, but engaged in illegal activities to make ends meet. It seemed normal to me, but I was in an environment that normalized abnormal things.
I eventually dropped out of high school, moved to Indianapolis, and started a family. But when I got laid off, I turned in desperation to the drug life, trying to do for my family what my parents did for me.
If I’d had a modest child allowance for my own children, I wouldn’t have had to rely on the most accessible path available to me, the drug business.
One fateful night, I heard gunshots near the building where I had my drug business. I didn’t think much of it—shots weren’t unusual in that neighborhood. I finished my business for the day, proud of the money I’d made, and went home to my family.
Later, I learned a young man had been shot—and I was arrested for the murder.
I’d been blamed by someone with a drug-related grudge against me. A bystander had identified a very different man with a different physical description, but the detective buried that evidence. Advocates uncovered this evidence 25 years later, and I was exonerated and released. I’d spent a hellish 11 of those 25 years in solitary confinement.
During my incarceration, I became a teacher and mentor. Now I’m an advocate for people returning to society after incarceration.
I see the systemic barriers they face. Returning citizens are prohibited from hundreds of jobs—from working in education, health, and government to even becoming a barber or Uber driver. They’re barred from public assistance, public housing, and student loans. They face discrimination in housing and employment. They often have significant physical and mental health issues they can’t afford to treat.
These are the very conditions that sometimes lead to offenses and recidivism. Numerous studies have found that when people are securely employed, housed, and allowed to receive an education and meet their health needs, they don’t re-offend.
These people have already been punished and served their time—sometimes for offenses they never committed, like me. We shouldn’t be punished again when reintegrating into our families and societies.
As part of my work, I volunteer with Michigan Liberation, a statewide organization looking to end the criminalization of Black families and communities of color. Recently, they joined a Guaranteed Income Now conference co-hosted by Community Change and the Economic Security Project.
Guaranteed income can take many forms. It can be an expansion of current tax credits like the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit. It can be a no-strings-attached Child Allowance or a monthly payment to qualifying people, families, unpaid caretakers, undocumented immigrants, and returning citizens—all of whom are currently ineligible for assistance.
In Flint, it looks like a new program that offers pregnant people and new parents a monthly check for the first year of the baby’s life.
If my parents had a guaranteed income floor, we wouldn’t have been in danger of falling through into hunger and homelessness. They would have had significantly better chances to pursue well-paying jobs to provide for my security—without relying on illegal activity.
If I’d had a modest child allowance for my own children, I wouldn’t have had to rely on the most accessible path available to me, the drug business. I wouldn’t have been anywhere near the site of that murder—and wouldn’t have lost decades of my life to a false accusation.
It’s worth it to support our families and communities, no matter where we live or what we look like. When those facing the most systemic barriers receive sufficient income support, then economic security, thriving, and freedom are the result.
And I can tell you, there’s nothing sweeter than freedom.
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Meet the Secretive Rich Funding Efforts to Keep Others Poor
With both millionaires and homelessness on the rise in the U.S., right-wing donors are bankrolling a nationally coordinated move to end experiments in basic income.
Apr 03, 2024
America, a new report details, is minting millionaires at a record pace. Some 37% of the world’s millionaires, analysts at the wealth advisory firm Henley & Partners calculate, now call the United States home.
And these analysts are talking real millionaires, not those Americans who rate as “millionaires” only because they’re living in homes that have wildly appreciated in value since their purchase decades ago. Those appreciations have left typical 50-something American homeowners, the latest Federal Reserve stats show, with personal net worths a bit over $1 million.
The researchers from Henley and their partners at New World Wealth don’t count these house-rich homeowners as millionaires. They only rate as millionaires those households with over $1 million in investible assets—and the United States, their research finds, hosts far, far more of these honest-to-goodness millionaires than any other nation on Earth.
In February, lawmakers in Arizona, home to the nation’s fourth-highest homeless rate, passed a bill that bans “any program where persons are provided with regular, periodic cash payments” they can use “for any purpose.”
The numbers: Over 5.5 million Americans now hold liquid assets worth over $1 million. That total has soared 62% over the past decade, “well above,” observesCNBC analyst Robert Frank, the overall global real-millionaire increase of a mere 38%.
Rich people-friendly observers of America’s economic scene, naturally enough, see stats like these as cause for nothing but celebration. The wealthier our wealthiest become, they postulate, the more jobs—and wealth—these rich create for everyone else. A rising tide, as they like to quip, lifts all boats.
But we are, in fact, seeing no significant rising of any sort for America’s working families. We are witnessing instead stunning increases in what America’s rich are spending on themselves. One revealing recent stat: Our U.S. well-to-do, researchers at Art Basel and the banking giant UBS report, now account for 42% of global fine art sales, well above China’s 19% second-place share.
Another reflection of America’s luxury-spending dominance: The world’s top premium luxury brands—think glamorous retailers like Cartier, Bergdorf Goodman, and Gucci—all have flagship stores in Manhattan. Just this past December, the luxury powerhouse Prada announced plans to spend $835 million buying up the building that hosts its current Fifth Avenue flagship and the building next door.
For America’s poorest, meanwhile, “luxury” has come to mean keeping a roof over your head.
The number of Americans chronically homeless, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development reported out this past December, has been climbing since 2016—in what Jeff Olivet, the director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, likens to a “game of really vicious musical chairs.” The United States, he explains, has “an incredible deficit of affordable housing units,” with only one unit available for every three extremely low-income renters.
And “if someone has a medical condition, a mental health disability, a substance use disorder,” Olivet adds, “it makes it all that much more complex for someone to exit homelessness.”
The solution to this growing housing squeeze? America’s most conservative lawmakers have one. Let’s simply do our best, these lawmakers are proposing, to keep our nation’s homeless out of sight.
In Florida, that approach has actually become law. Governor Ron DeSantis, fresh off his go-nowhere campaign for the GOP presidential nomination, has just signed into law legislation that makes it illegal for local municipalities to let homeless people camp or sleep on public property after this October 1.
“Florida,” DeSantis declared upon the bill’s signing, “will not allow homeless encampments to intrude on its citizens or undermine their quality of life like we see in states like New York and California.”
The new Florida law requires local governments without enough bed capacity for unhoused families to set up homeless camps far from parks and other public facilities—and the act also penalizes localities that wink at rough sleeping outside these new hidden-away camps.
Diana Stanley, a top exec in Palm Beach charity circles, considers Florida’s new approach “a statement that we’ve stopped caring about our brothers and sisters.” The main message Stanley takes from the state’s new homelessness legislation: “If we can’t see them, then we don’t have to help them.”
Florida’s latest homeless legislation, Stanley stresses, “does absolutely nothing to address the root cause of homelessness, the lack of affordable housing.” The state’s focus, agrees University of Central Florida sociologist Amy Donley, ought to be on “helping people into housing, not encampments.”
Measures that would help do just that, meanwhile, have come under intense fire from right-wing lawmakers in other states. Those lawmakers are particularly aiming that fire at state and local experiments in providing low-income families with guaranteed, no-strings basic incomes.
In Iowa, one GOP state legislator is calling such basic-income efforts “socialism on steroids.” The sponsor of another move to ban basic incomes, South Dakota’s John Wiik, is charging that basic-income plans amount to “a one-way ticket to government dependency.” In February, lawmakers in Arizona, home to the nation’s fourth-highest homeless rate, passed a bill that bans “any program where persons are provided with regular, periodic cash payments” they can use “for any purpose.”
As of the end of February, lawmakers in some four other states had introduced bills with similar bans.
Who’s driving this nationally coordinated move to end experiments in basic income? Some of America’s most secretive wealthy, charges a recent analysis by Scott Santens, the founder and president of the Income To Support All Foundation.
These wealthy, Santens notes, have been bankrolling an outfit that calls itself the Foundation for Government Accountability, “a lobbying group with a billionaire-fueled junk science record every American should know about.”
Among the Foundation’s prime funders: the hard-right billionaires Richard and Liz Uihlein, the nation’s fourth-largest contributors to political campaigns. The Uihleins have pumped almost $18 million into the machinations of the Foundation for Government Accountability. Almost that much has come from the Donors Trust network, a powerhouse that has become what Mother Jonescalls “the dark-money ATM of the right.”
Other major Foundation for Government Accountability funders include assorted deep-pocket entities with a history, notes Climate Investigations Center director Kert Davies, of “hating regulation and trying to stop any progress on things like climate change because they see it as almost a step toward communism.”
The billionaires underwriting all these entities, Income To Support All Foundation.’s Scott Santens believes, share a common fundamental outlook. They fear “a world where things are a bit less unequal,” a world without so many average people “having no power to say anything but yes.”
May those rich see emerge that new world they so fear. Soon.
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