Financial Transparency Coalition

There are obvious relationships between illicit financial flows, corruption, and tax evasion and environmental sustainability. For example, shell corporations can be used to mask illegal fishing or poaching. Corruption can enable companies to get around environmental compliance laws. And tax evasion can divert valuable resources away from environmental enforcement. In sum, illicit financial flows are human constructs that supplement and enhance damaging human behavior, contributing both to stagnating economic growth and worsening environmental conditions. But is there another—more direct—way to examine illicit financial flows and the environmental sustainability? The definition of sustainability isn’t as obvious as you’d think. “Sustainable” in its...

WASHINGTON D.C. – Global Financial Integrity (GFI), a Washington-based research and advocacy organization, praised the commitments made to address illicit financial flows by leaders in government and business at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, also known as the Rio+20, Conference this week.

Senator John Kerry and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations conducted a hearing yesterday regarding the challenges of illegal ivory trafficking from Africa. While the topic may seem less urgent in times when widespread unemployment, poverty and global economic crisis receive the bulk of officials' attention, Senator Kerry believes that “we never have the right to turn our backs on the values that define us.” Poaching for the purpose of selling illicit ivory is a travesty, and responsible for the deaths of countless elephants every year:

“If you don’t know how to fix it, please stop breaking it,” was the press headline when Severn Suzuki addressed heads of states in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. She was twelve years old, at what was then the world’s biggest-ever political gathering. In an impassioned critique of unfettered industrialism, Severn lamented the decline of the natural world, and the many injustices that man has wrought upon it. “I’m fighting for my future,” she said.