Our Areas of Impact: Reimagine Entire Economies
Our vision is that entire economies are fundamentally sustainable.
In many cases, this issue is simplified to “overexploitation.” This term, however, does not capture the entirety of the issue. When solving extraction is approached by creating protected areas or making activities illegal, the underlying drivers of the extractive activities are not holistically addressed. In many cases, there will simply be a shift to a different extractive activity. In addition, we ask the people who can least afford to bear the cost of protection, to do so, when they are not the end user, the consumer, or the driver of the issue itself.
All of our work at Conservation X Labs supports moving from economies of the past, which were based on extraction, to economies of the future, which are based on sustainability and regeneration. This means we must realign incentives from encouraging degradation and deforestation to instead encouraging circularity; by adjusting the incentive structure, we aim to stimulate creative, sustainable replacement products that meet the economic needs of the population and honor the natural environment in which those activities take place.
