Conference Sponsors and Funders
Today, August 23 begins World Water Week hosted by the Stockholm International Water Institute. The objective of the meeting is to “link scientific understanding with policy and decision-making [to] provide concrete solutions to water, environmental and development challenges.” Speakers from around the world share their knowledges, research, collaborations, and experiences with water. Talks focus on issues related to irrigation, sanitation, transboundary river management, and building climate resilience, among others. These are really important conversations to have given the certainty of climate change impacts, as described by the latest IPCC report.
As I watched a webinar on transboundary river management this morning, I listened to a representative from the World Bank discuss their accomplishments over the past few decades. I was somewhat confused at the proclamation of such “accomplishments” given their involvement in their historical and ongoing funding of destructive hydropower projects. As I scrolled through the multitude of other participants, I came to the sponsor page.
Have you ever wondered who funds, sponsors, and supports these conferences? I frequently question the role of sponsors, as well as their intentions, at environmental-social conferences. What does their sponsorship mean? Does their business model align with the goals of the meeting? What kind of agenda are these corporations pushing? How do we reconcile their proclamations of “accomplishments” with the well-documented cases of social and environmental degradation that those same companies are responsible for? Is their funding a valid effort at taking corporate social responsibility or a mask?
COP24 in Poland was sponsored by coal industry leaders, despite the overall aim of the conference “to develop cooperative strategies to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in order to prevent the dangerous impacts of climate change.” The Poland exhibit space at COP24 showcased all the supposedly wonderful uses of coal (paperweight, earrings, decorative center pieces). Poland’s continued commitment to coal earned it the title Colossal Fossil by the Climate Network for the country’s insistence that they will utilize coal for the next 200 years. Other COP (Conference of Parties meetings of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) similarly have corporate/industry sponsors that send conflicting messages to delegates and participants and have checkered histories.
The Global Climate Action Summit in California in September 2018 was sponsored in-part by the Mahindra group. Keshub Mahindra, emeritus Chairman (1963-2012) of the Mahindra Group was convicted in 2010 of causing death by negligence, culpable homicide, and gross negligence in the December 1984 Bhopal disaster.
Sponsors of World Water Week include Nestle, Walton Foundation, the IDB (Inter American Development Bank), and Facebook. Nestle has been the center of lawsuits for its overexploitation and extraction of groundwater in California, Florida, and Michigan. Nestle is also extracting millions of liters of water per day from Six Nations treaty lands, while residents have no running water. Their global negative impacts on society and the environment can be reviewed on the violation tracker website.
The Walton Foundation has spent billions of dollars on the Colorado River basin research and management, promoting “demand management” whereby water is further commoditized via speculation. In this scenario, farmers are paid to stop irrigating their fields in order to boost water levels in Lake Powell. Critics are beginning to oppose involvement of such a conglomeration of corporate interests with water politics. A former editor of the Boulder Weekly stated: “They’ve (the Walton Family Foundation) spread their money so much they’ve diluted anyone who could push back,” essentially controlling the water management agenda.
The IDB is known for funding 140 dams throughout Latin America between 1960 and 1999, to the cost of almost $10 billion. In the process, they have caused irreparable social and ecological harm in Indigenous and rural communities. The IDB has even acknowledged the conflicts associated with using dams as development.
In a recent journal article by Dr. Rebecca Gruby of Colorado State University and her colleagues, we should be paying more attention to the philanthropy of environmental governance. We need to question the links between funder/sponsors and the climate governance agenda. And ask questions like: What do those connections mean for the justice and equity of decision-making processes at conferences?
Understanding financial connections may in-part explain why climate policy makers have maintained the status quo in negotiations, which have resulted in increased global temperatures, greenhouse gas emissions, and atmospheric concentrations of CO2. This knowledge may lead us to build more effective and sustainable solutions that are also just and equitable.