Our team is interested in investigating the links between basic income, biodiversity conservation and climate change. The aim is to explore an innovative, practical and scalable approach to address the social and environmental challenges associated with climate change and biodiversity loss.

Basic Income, Climate Change Mitigation and Biodiversity Conservation

Basic Income for Nature and Climate (BINC) is a new mechanism for funding biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation activities. The BINC proposal combines core Basic Income (BI) principles with environmental goals, aiming to protect biodiversity and mitigate climate change while reducing social inequity. BINC offers regular payments to communities near or within critical conservation or climate areas to support livelihoods, and reduce their dependence on exploitative and unsustainable resource extraction. In order to protect ancestral practices, encourage and/or incentivise new sustainable uses of forest resources, whilst also enabling freedom when choosing alternative development pathways, we believe that new financial mechanisms are needed for the inhabitants of these regions. In this context, basic income could play a central role in enabling the sustainable management of critical ecosystems.

Why BINC? How does it work?

BINC is a people-led approach. It recognises that in order to achieve justice, a much greater redistribution of resources is needed between those who have historically taken more and caused more harm, and those who continue to suffer injustices arising from environmental exploitation. It can be framed as a form of compensation for the unpaid labour many rural communities devote to activities that contribute to conservation outcomes, on lands under their control. By reducing oversight, cutting bureaucracy, and bypassing intermediaries, BINC empowers local communities and streamlines funding. Unlike current and popular market-based instruments (MBIs), BINC is an instrument of social justice.

Outlook: Scaling up BINC for a just and sustainable future

While BINC is not a silver bullet, it is by far the most scalable mechanism to address the polycrisis of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and inequalities. BINC is part of a broader and more comprehensive programme for transformative change that also includes extractive industries encroaching on local conservation spaces and the establishment of improved governance frameworks and policies to enable those conditions. These must include the formalisation of land and tenure rights for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, since many of them live on lands that already contribute to conservation outcomes and/or are legally protected and excluded from land conversion.

The next step is to learn from existing BINC projects and use this learning to replicate BINC projects in other sites and at greater scale. This should be done in collaboration with local partners, guided by transdisciplinary research integrating economic, ecological, and sociological methods. This approach will generate insights to adapt and improve projects while developing a scalable model and best practices. As we work to transform conservation and climate financing to promote equity and sustainability, we invite donors and partners to join us in pioneering this innovative approach by implementing pilot projects for a more just and sustainable future.

How could a global BINC program be funded?

A key challenge for BINC is securing sustainable funding without relying on global environmental markets. Researchers have estimated that funding BINC globally would likely cost between USD 351billion and 6.73 trillion annually depending on the number of recipients and level of payment. These sums are already well within the scope of what is projected to be needed to scale up global conservation and climate action in the future. It is estimated that between 1/3 and 1/4 of the world’s total wealth is hidden in offshore tax havens. Global subsidies for environmentally harmful activities such as fossil fuel and conventional agricultural production are estimated at USD 2.6 trillion per year. If even a small portion of these funds were directed to BINC, it could easily fund implementation of a substantial international programme. Concrete financing sources for BINC have been proposed, such as linking it to climate change mitigation through the concept of a Forest Carbon Dividend or a “Cap and Share” mechanism proposed by the Cap and Share Alliance.

How FRIBIS contributes

The BINC working group is a joint initiative between FRIBIS and researchers based at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain), Florida International University (USA), Freiburg University (Germany), UIII – Indonesian International Islamic University (Indonesia), Wageningen University (the Netherlands) and York University (Canada), as well as development agency GIZ (Germany) and NGOs Cool Earth (Peru, UK), GiveDirectly (Germany, UK) and WCS (Cambodia).

Further research will be conducted at FRIBIS to explore the feasibility of various BINC pilots, in order to test impacts on livelihoods and nature. FRIBIS provides scientific expertise, financial support, and facilitates advocacy and policy dialogue of the proposed basic income scheme at the international level. The long-term goal of our team is to implement a multi-year BINC project at scale, using the expertise of the members that constitute our group.

Learn more about Basic Income for Nature and Climate here:

• Mumbunan S., Maitri, N.M.R., Tazkiana, D., Prasojo, A., Sihite, F., Nabella, D.M. (2021). Basic Income for Nature and Climate. On the first Basic Income proposal to conserve nature and combat climate change on the largest tropical island on Earth. Depok: Research Center for Climate Change Universitas Indonesia. (ISBN 978-602-60534-3).
• Schmidt-Pramov, F. (2021). A basic income for nature and climate in Tanah Papua. Berlin: GIZ. (Policy Brief).
• A webinar on the launching of the first Basic Income for Nature and Climate report and dissemination of findings can be found here [videos available in Indonesian only].

Dr. Marcel Franke studied economics at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg. He is also active in the FRIBIS Team “Basic Income for Peacebuilding”. His research focuses on unconditional basic income and philosophy of state, especially “Constitutional Economics” and “Economics of Social Justice”.
Contact: marcel.franke@vwl.uni-freiburg.de

Dr. Sonny Mumbunan is an economist at the Research Centre for Climate Change of the University of Indonesia (RCCC UI). He is the founder of Basic Income Lab under RCCC UI, which is a new lab spearheading the scientific discussion on basic income for nature and climate in Indonesia. Sonny is also a senior economist at the World Resources Institute (WRI) Indonesia, where he coordinates the country work for the New Climate Economics. He wrote his dissertation at the Economics Department of the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and earned his PhD in Economics (Dr.rer.pol.) from Universität Leipzig, Germany. Sonny lives in Jakarta, Indonesia and is an active member of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) and Indonesian Academy of Young Scientists (ALMI).
He lives in Jakarta, Indonesia

Jocelyne Sze (she/her) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Spain (ICTA-UAB). She primarily works on how geospatial data are used in conservation and the relationships between Indigenous Peoples and conservation. She is also interested in degrowth and convivial conservation concepts such as the Basic Income for Nature and Climate. Her overarching interest is in forwarding equitable and effective conservation practices and policies.

Emiel de Lange is Conservation Impact Technical Advisor with the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Cambodia program. He runs the Knowledge & Research team which implements and supports research activities in support of the WCS Cambodia program, working closely with academic, community and civil society partners. A particular focus is the Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary REDD+ program, where he works with the Bunong Indigenous people on developing rights-based approaches to conservation of biodiversity. BINC is one approach among others being explored in support of this. He completed his doctoral studies at the University of Edinburgh, UK, and now lives in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Omar Saif is a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Wildlife Conservation Society, Cambodia. Omar’s research concerns how to make conservation practice more socially just by working directly with organisations. His present role centres on addressing shortcomings in how Benefit Sharing Mechanisms are conceptualised and designed in carbon projects. In his PhD, he studied the biodiversity conservation political landscape in Nepal, focusing on the barriers and challenges to including diverse voices and alternative practices within organizational structures. Taking a feminist political ecology approach, he broadly focuses on theories of trust, power and justice with a desire to promote counter-capitalist and decolonial forms of conservation.

Bernhard Neumärker is the head of FRIBIS and the Götz Werner Professor of Economic Policy and Director of the Department of Economic Policy and Order Theory at the University of Freiburg. For many years, he has been addressing issues of social justice, societal conflicts, and the willingness of the state to reform from an ordoliberal perspective. Recently, he has been applying his concepts of “New Ordoliberalism” (also called “Progressive Ordoliberalism”) and “Social Sustainability,” which stem from these issues, to the concept of unconditional basic income. He lives in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.

Georg Buchholz is the team lead of the GIZ International Forest Policy programme in Eschborn, Germany, supporting the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) on all international forest policy matters. Before that, he worked for over 25 years in Asia within the forestry and nature conservation sector. His last assignment was the Forest and Climate Change Programme (FORCLIME) in Indonesia, implemented by GIZ and Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry, supporting policy development on forest and climate change at national and sub-national levels, including public financing options for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) and nature conservation. This was also the time when the idea of BINC was born in a joint effort with Dr. Sonny Mumbunan during a visit to West Papua. He graduated from the Faculty of Forestry in Freiburg, Germany, is an active member of the Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) and the German Foresters Association, and now lives in Freiburg, Germany

Martin Simonneau is Advocacy Lead at Cool Earth, in charge of promoting the organisation’s innovative approach to forest conservation. Cool Earth is an international NGO that supports people who live in rainforests, as a way to combat biodiversity loss and climate change. Since 2008, they have been delivering unconditional cash transfers directly to people and communities and launched the first BINC pilot with Indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon in 2023. He lives in Oxford, UK

Hannes Hotz is advisor for international forest policy at Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in Eschborn. He has worked for almost nine years in Peru on forest governance and sustainable forest management, both for GIZ and the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI). He was also a research analyst at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability (IDOS) in Bonn and the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) in Berlin. He is an alumnus of IDOS´s Postgraduate Program for Sustainability Cooperation. He holds a B.Sc. in International Forest Ecosystem Management from the University of Eberswalde and an M.Sc. in Environmental Sciences from the University of Wageningen. He lives in Freiburg.

GiveDirectly is a charity based in New York City that uses an electronic payment system to combat poverty by providing direct cash transfers to people in need. Since then, it has been funded in part by prominent donors. In the context of the discussion on universal basic income, GiveDirectly has announced a large-scale field study that has gained international attention.

Lee Mcloughlin is currently a PhD candidate at the Department of Global Sociocultural Studies at Florida International University. Lee returned to academia after a decade working in Central America towards the improvement of protected area management, biodiversity conservation, and community livelihoods, working with local and international NGOs. In the latter part of this decade Lee also worked on the promotion and communication of the importance of the ‘Five Great Forests’ of Mesoamérica to regional and global audiences. His research looks at the dynamics of territoriality and decolonization in the biocultural assemblage of southern Belize, with broader interests in emerging decolonizing approaches to biodiversity conservation.

Robert Fletcher is Associate Professor in the Sociology of Development and Change group at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. He is an environmental anthropologist with research interests in conservation, development, ecotourism, globalization, climate change, social and resistance movements, and non-state forms of governance. He uses a political ecology approach to explore how culturally-specific understandings of human-nonhuman relations and political economic structures intersect to inform patterns of natural resource use and conflict. Among other publications, he is the author of Romancing the Wild: Cultural Dimensions of Ecotourism (Duke University, 2014) and Failing Forward: The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Conservation (U of California, 2023), and co-author of The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature beyond the Anthropocene (Verso, 2020).