- Existing conservation models often overlook or exclude local or indigenous peoples and fail to adequately address biodiversity loss.
- As an alternative, convivial conservation promotes the coexistence of people and nature, rather than a strict separation between them.
- Basic Income for Nature and Climate Change is a new approach that proposes unconditional cash payments to communities in biodiversity- and climate-critical areas to support both livelihoods and ecosystems.
- The views in the commentary are that of the author.
Globally, while efforts are underway to achieve conservation aims, our collective progress remains limited in the face of biodiversity loss, land and sea degradation, and mounting social and ecological pressures resulting from climate change. This is further hindered by non-inclusive ways to do conservation, which exclude and marginalise local and indigenous peoples and can go as far as causing human rights abuses in the name of attempting to achieve conservation goals.
Besides this, conservation tends to be a “crisis” discipline, with limited time to address the intertwined climate-biodiversity-pollution crisis on an ever-restricted budget. Hence, it becomes essential to rethink conservation in transformative ways, not only in how it is practiced but also in how it is funded.
This is where convivial conservation approaches become important. It promotes the coexistence of wildlife and people, rather than separating them as in strict protected areas. This approach to conservation is based on a holistic “whole earth” vision where the principle is that human places and nature can and should be integrated within both rural and urban spaces. This is an alternative to proposals such as “half earth,” which are premised on strict “protection” and limiting or removing human use.
To facilitate a more inclusive approach, a transformation of the global economy and a more equal distribution of wealth are needed. Market-based instruments (MBIs) such as ecotourism and payment for ecosystem services programmes, despite more than thirty years of trials and implementation, have delivered few success stories and attracted a range of criticism.
This is particularly problematic because hundreds of billions of dollars are spent annually to address conservation and climate issues. Yet, the majority of these funds remains captured by already wealthy and powerful organisations and actors in the Global North. Very little reaches the poorest of the poor in the Global South, who need it most. And even these funds are considered woefully inadequate to effectively confront the scale of the problems to be addressed.
MBI aims to incentivise conservation by ascribing sufficient monetary value to protected resources to cover the opportunity costs of alternative land uses, thereby making conservation more profitable than resource extraction. However, in practice, MBIs have often failed to generate enough revenue for conservation to actually outcompete resource extraction. Secondly, MBIs often tend to be “top-heavy” with a large portion of invested resources going to institutional overhead or technical consultants rather than the local resource users. Furthermore, there have been various critiques of the negative social impacts of MBIs, which include displacement and dispossession, undermining local governance structures, and increased community conflicts.
The five pillars of basic income
This is where the idea of integrating concepts of Basic Income (BI) support for conservation finance, in the form of a Basic Income for Nature and Climate Change (BINC), emerges. A core of the BI model is cash transfer programmes (CTPs), which were originally developed to address and overcome problems created by conventional market-led development policies. Rather than predefining development projects, CTPs provide cash payments directly to programme participants to spend (predominantly) as they choose. CTPs can have conditions attached to them or can be unconditional. Many CTPs also include complementary services or training programmes — a so-called ‘cash+’ approach. Basic Income, like CTPs, proposes direct cash payments to recipients, yet is premised on providing payments that can cover an individual’s total basic needs, although this definition is debated.
A genuine BI must embody five key principles. First, it must be periodic, meaning it is paid at regular intervals, rather than a lump sum payment. Second, it should be a cash payment, provided in an appropriate medium of exchange that allows recipients the freedom to decide how best to use it. Therefore, it can’t be paid in kind (e.g., services) or in vouchers for specific use (e.g., food vouchers). Third, it is individual, meaning it is allocated to each person rather than distributed at the household level. Fourth, it is universal, available to all within the boundaries of a given jurisdiction or project. Finally, it is unconditional, provided without means testing and without a requirement to work or to demonstrate willingness to work.
The BINC proposal aims to integrate these core BI principles to pursue environmental protection alongside poverty alleviation in areas of high biodiversity and climate value. The result would be a regular payment to members of communities living in or near areas considered critical for conservation and/or climate mitigation, to subsidise livelihoods based on sustainable resource use. BINC thus offers an alternative approach to conservation finance that may compensate for the various deficiencies associated with MBIs. It explicitly centres local people’s rights and builds trust between donors and recipients as a first step to achieving justice.
As the payments won’t be tied to a specific valuation of “ecosystem services,” BINC can help reverse the commodification of natural resources that MBIs encourage. This can be a meaningful alternative to partake in locally relevant and sensitive livelihoods rather than extractive industries. Providing unconditional payments would give recipients the freedom and autonomy to decide how best to spend the money they receive.
Payments made by BINC, if we are to learn from the positives of CTPs, will likely manifest into three themes of positive outcomes. The first relates to post-development, where the well-being of recipient communities improves in ways defined by local priorities, rather than being externally imposed by development agendas. The second concerns social–ecological outcomes, reflecting how CBI can contribute to alternative forms of human–environment relations. The third involves the impact on biodiversity and wildlife through changes in social–ecological relations.
Financing pathways
As a potential use case, Changpa herders in Changthang, Ladakh, are struggling to sustain livestock grazing as extractive industries, such as large solar parks, expand onto their lands. Alongside this, limited markets for livestock products reduce the economic incentive, and tourism provides a different yet highly precarious economic alternative. Besides, Changpa herders have been marginalised for decades, thought of as backward with exclusionary conservation policies dumped onto them, ranging from tokenistic participation at best to threatening evictions and reducing land access to the worst.
A well-implemented BINC payment in this context would provide a dignified income, recognising the rights of being pastoralists. Through this, the occasional snow leopard or wolf might be killed in retaliation for their predatory behaviour against livestock, but the whole landscape will not be destroyed by extractive industries (e.g., mining and large solar parks) that threaten the very existence of pastoralists and wildlife that call it home.
Several questions remain, of course. How much should a BINC payment cost? De Lange et al. (2023) used three different payment rates to estimate a global costing. First, a rate of 25% of national GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity), which has been proposed as a reasonable baseline in the UBI literature. Second, it could be a constant rate of $5.50 per person per day. This is the poverty line in middle-income countries and is often considered the minimum income necessary for a healthy living globally. Third, the World Bank’s tiered poverty line for countries classified into different income groups. This is $1.90 per day for low-income countries, US$3.20 for lower-middle-income countries, $5.50 for upper-middle-income countries, and $21.70 for high-income countries. Who should be paid?
De Lange et al. (2023) again used three scenarios for the globe, focusing on people in and around. The first scenario considers existing protected areas, which cover around 14% of the land area. The second scenario considers key biodiversity areas, which cover around 8% of the land area. The third considers the estimated minimum land requiring conservation attention globally. Gross costs vary widely, depending on the areas and populations included, ranging from $351 billion to $6.73 trillion annually. These costs are substantial compared to current government conservation spending (~$133 billion in 2020), but represent a sensible investment in safeguarding incalculable social and natural values, as well as the estimated $44 trillion in global economic production that depends on nature.
So where will the money come from? Various suggestions exist, such as funds raised through taxation on environmentally harmful consumption and production, which have been suggested as a way for UBI to support a transition to sustainability, which aligns with the objectives of BINC. For example, subsidies for environmentally harmful energy and agricultural production have been estimated to be $280–$ 500 billion per year.
Yes, BINC is no silver bullet or a conservation panacea. Realising all core principles of BINC might be difficult, and it is important to acknowledge the tension between supporting the self-determination of programme participants and achieving (as well as evidencing) conservation and climate mitigation benefits. However, the world and its biodiversity are changing in unprecedented ways, and this changing world needs new and bold conservation paradigms. Paradigms that centre on inclusion, respect, and the rights of people, alongside the valuing and conservation of wildlife.
BINC can be part of a broader, more comprehensive programme for transformative change that includes directly confronting powerful extractive industries encroaching on local conservation spaces. The real question is, are we ready to trust the very people at the frontline of conservation issues, who for ages have been looked at with suspicion?
This commentary is based on a paper titled ‘Cash for conservation? Integrating basic income support into biodiversity and climate finance’, published in August 2025.
Munib Khanyari is a postdoctoral researcher at Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambientals (ICTA – UAB), and Programme Manager at the Nature Conservation Foundation, Mysore.
Banner image: An elderly Naga woman walks home after a day in the field in Kohima, Nagaland. (AP Photo/Yirmiyan Arthur)
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