The Fundación Del Río report said green financing isn’t having the desired effect partly because conservation projects are carried out inefficiently and in bad faith. One indicator of the government’s attitude towards the environment is that the annual budget for MARENA continues to decline even as the total government budget goes up. Its budget has dropped 55% since 2018 while the national budget has gone up by 40% since 2021.
One initiative, known as the Bio-CLIMA project, received $116.6 million in grants and loans to promote sustainable land and forest management in degraded landscapes in Bosawás Biosphere Reserve, near the northern Caribbean coast, and the Río San Juan Biosphere Reserve, in the south, with the aim of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and improving the livelihoods of vulnerable communities in the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor. Planting shade trees for crops and reducing cattle grazing areas could help improve carbon absorption capacity by 14%, an initiative outline said.
But in 2020 local communities asked the Green Climate Fund (GCF), a main backer of the initiative, not to move forward with the project out of concern that it would lead to more environmental degradation and attacks from non-Indigenous armed settlers, who have been pushing into ancestral territory to take advantage of unregulated farming, logging and mining.
“The financing of these projects has affected and devastated our forests as a result of deforestation,” the Alliance of Indigenous and Afro-descendant Peoples of Nicaragua said in a 2020 letter to the GCF board of directors. The project was ultimately cancelled earlier this year.
GCF didn’t respond to a request for comment for this story.
Fundación Del Río said the sources of green financing and their intermediaries need to more closely monitor whether investments in Nicaragua are leading to tangible improvements to the environment. It also encouraged them to strengthen oversight, transparency and follow-ups to financing.
“We want the international community to be responsible with the resources that are coming into the country when it comes to getting results,” Ruiz said. “…We need them to increase the level of follow-up, monitoring and evaluation of programs that they finance, not leaving it to the state or auditors that we know are co-opted by the regime.”
Banner image: The San Juan River in Nicaragua. Photo via Wikimedia.
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