The UN biodiversity (CBD) COP15 summit is a once-in-a-decade moment to create a global deal for nature to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.
While what’s in the final text matters, it won’t tell the whole story. A good outcome will also depend on how business, financial investors and development finance institutions respond.
Promising signs are emerging showing that our economists, investors, regulators and legal profession are taking action to protect and restore nature.
This Summit can help mainstream and scale up this action into our economy, urging companies, banks and investors to treat the destruction of nature as a serious liability and integrate nature into their spending and lending.
Indigenous Peoples and Local Community (IPLC) Rights
- Conservation sometimes gets a bad reputation of putting nature ahead of people. We are only going to succeed if both work in unison.
- Given IPLCs are the most effective asset we have to protect nature, this recognition must be reflected in the negotiated outcome and in the increased direct access these groups get to funding.
Ambitious global goals
- New, measurable biodiversity goals (timelines and targets) which will be enough to halt biodiversity loss and even reverse biodiversity decline.
- This should include protected areas, but also help to restore the diversity and abundance of nature.
Visible finance deal
- The current gap in finance for the protection and restoration of nature is USD$711 billion a year.
- While some government donors and philanthropy have put money on the table to kick start action, it’s not enough to deliver at scale.
- To fund the protection of nature, a fair and credible plan to scale up predictable funding is required
- And this must include both public sources of money – from donors and multilateral development banks and shift broader financial flows to be in line with the agreed goals of COP15.
Plan of action
- A common critique of previous CBD goals is that they were never met.
- In order to fix this we need to see countries coming back on a regular basis to demonstrate how they will meet the COP15 targets and update their targets based on the goals agreed in COP15
Share the spoils of nature
- COP15 should agree a plan for how countries and companies will share the benefits and access to genetic resources (aka Digital Sequencing Information).
