How far have we come in achieving the biodiversity targets set for this decade by the United Nations?

The Sustainable Development Goals 14 and 15, dealing with marine and terrestrial resources, respectively, draw significantly on the Aichi (Biodiversity) Targets that were adopted as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020, in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010.

You can see the global progress in each Aichi Target from the CBD web site.

According to the IUCN, “Despite the commitments made by governments in 2010 to take effective and urgent action to halt the loss of biodiversity to ensure resilient ecosystems by 2020, much remains to be done still”.

Yet, looking at the biodiversity barometer, there is still hope. According to the Union for Ethical Biotrade (UEBP), "Respect for biodiversity is gaining importance among consumers; Gen Z & Millennials are more aware about biodiversity than older generations and with the rise of social media, consumers look for concrete examples and evidence on ethical sourcing practices for fact checking and sharing". UEBP believes the respect for biodiversity will likely be reinforced by people’s awareness of the link between biodiversity and human health post Covid-19".

The findings of Seidl et al. (2020) are also slightly encouraging: the amount and percentage of public biodiversity investment to Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is increasing.

The good signs are still very blurry though. As stated by David Ainsworth from the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, "it is obvious that if we are going to achieve a much higher level of awareness of the importance of biodiversity, of its values, of what we can do to protect it, we need to take additional efforts".

Will we be able to build on the experience and lessons learnt from the past decade?

Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet at the 15th Conference of Parties (COP 15) to carve out a Post-2020 Framework for Global Biodiversity Conservation. You can follow the preparations by the CBD for the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework from their web page:

As already identified by Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) back in 2019, hopefully the future biodiversity targets will be clearer, unambiguous and incorporate quantitative elements to be more effective.