UK Premiere: Banking Nature + Q&A

This screening will be followed by a Q&A with director Sandrine Feydel.

Protecting our planet has become big business, with companies like Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan Chase promoting new environmental markets. Investors buy up vast swathes of land, full of endangered species, to enable them to sell ‘nature credits’. Companies whose actions destroy the environment are now obliged to buy these credits and new financial centres have sprung up, specialising in this trade.

Many respected economists believe that the best way to protect nature is to put a price on it. But others fear that this market in nature could lead to companies taking a financial interest in a species’ extinction. There are also concerns that – like the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 – the market in nature credits is bound to crash. And there are wider issues at stake. What guarantees do we have that our natural inheritance will be protected? And should our ecological heritage be for sale?

In Banking Nature, directors Sandrine Feydel and Denis Delestrac investigate the commercialisation of the natural world. Interviews with respected economists like Pavan Sukhev reveal the polarised views toward this method of placing a monetary value on natural resources that are in jeopardy of disappearing.

Directed by Sandrine Feydel and Denis Delestrac
Duration: 90′
Year: 2014