The Bio-rights Principle

As mentioned in the United Nations Millennium Declaration, rural development is stagnating worldwide. For people living in rural areas the (over)exploitation of natural resources is one of the few options remaining to avoid poverty.

The over-exploitation of natural resources is seriously compromising long-term development, ensuring that people remain poor, trapped in a so-called poverty trap.

bio-rights offers a novel approach to addressing this situation, an approach with the potential to effectively increasing income while at the same time stimulating conservation and sustainable exploitation of natural resources.

The idea is simple: bio-rights channels investments to cover the local costs of introducing and maintaining sustainable use of natural resources. Global stakeholders profit from the long term benefits of the natural resources, while local people gain an increased income.
Click on the icon for a presentation.

The Bio-rights approach has been implemented for several years, among others in wetlands in Indonesia, Mali and Costa Rica.
These projects are providing essential information for the further development of Bio-rights, especially regarding the practical implementation of the financial mechanism which will make Bio-rights into a reliable and durable initiative. An important theoretical study was completed in the spring of 2004 which offers a model to determine the costs and benefits of Bio-rights.

Please click on the icon to download the report.

At the same time, steps are being taken to develop a Bio-rights Fund, a sustainable source of funding for Bio-rights which will ensure the long-term success of the approach.

A draft paper for a Bio-rights Fund has been formulated following discussions with the Rabo Bank, Wageningen University, Wetlands International and environmental consultancies. This draft was used as an input to the UNEP-Finance Initiatives Round Table in Tokyo, October 2003.
The draft paper also provides ideas on how such funding can help to create public-private partnerships. In particular in poverty trapped areas public money should act as venture capital and guarantee funds, thus decreasing the risk profile in poverty areas to levels conducive to private capital investment for sustainable development.

Please click on the icon to download the draft.

We also prepared an Acrobat booklet which describes the rationale behind Bio-rights in detail as well as a document that provides a short description on the practical implementation of the approach.
Please click on the icons below to download. It's a bit more than 7 MB so, please do keep in mind that the download could take a while if you have a slow connection.

FINANCIAL MECHANISMS FOR POVERTY - ENVIRONMENT ISSUES The Bio-rights System

Several documents were developed that describe why Bio-rights is of interest to the corporate sector, to governments and NGOs and to the finance sector (click on the links below to view the documents).

The Corporate sector	The Public sector	The Private sector