Some Initial Reflections on CBD COP15

This piece reflects my personal views only and not those of any of the organizations I work for.

I just wrapped up a whirlwind week in Montreal for my first ever COP (the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 15th Conference of the Parties - COP15) and what a rich, inspiring, worrying, connecting, intellectually stimulating, humanizing, tiring, and multi-faceted experience it was! I will be digesting all that I took in this last week for some time to come. However, several insights have emerged that I wanted to share while the energy of the week is still palpable.

Global cooperation and politics

Global cooperation through the UN processes is a beautiful and inspiring thing. Witnessing, close-up, how global agreements are hammered out and all of the energy and care countries pour into negotiations was fascinating. I believe that we are rediscovering the critical role of cooperation in planetary evolution and it was cool to see how country and regional representatives work to listen to, understand, and compromise with each other.

The trust between the countries of the Global North and Global South is in desperate need of strengthening. This will require Global North countries to deliver and help mobilize the funding that is required to implement both the Paris Agreement and the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). Another critical component of strengthening this trust and empowering countries in the Global South to deliver the actions needed to ensure continued provision of ecosystem services the whole world depends on includes debt and tax justice. Recommending again this excellent article by Jessica Dempsey and colleagues, 'Biodiversity targets will not be met without debt and tax justice .' With the IMF estimating ~60% of the poorest countries are already at high risk of debt distress or already in distress , it seems the time is right to more systematically integrate the value of nature into sovereign debt markets and to massively scale up debt for nature swaps.

The role of business, finance, and markets

The financial sector and businesses showed up to the CBD COP like never before. Given that I worked on ensuring this outcome with many colleagues over the past two years, this was inspiring to see. While many private sector actors have a long way to go to develop practical roadmaps to becoming nature positive, many now understand their fundamental dependence on ecosystem services at a high level and are making commitments to do their part to bend the curve of nature loss and to invest in regeneration. Governments are therefore empowered to make ambitious commitments in line with those from the private sector and can pursue policy and regulation that drives laggards to move along.

Markets for ecosystem services have potential to support the implementation of the GBF, but key issues must be addressed to ensure integrity and positive social and economic outcomes. This was a VERY hot topic this week. I enjoyed discussions on the potential for biodiversity credits/ certificates/ shares/ tokens to contribute to the goals of the GBF while supporting the livelihoods and sovereignty of indigenous peoples and local communities.?I am encouraged by the work the World Economic Forum, Biodiversity Credit Alliance, Pollination, and McKinsey are doing on this front. A point I keep reiterating is that we need to ensure we shift markets to support the reinforcement and expansion of the commons. We don’t need further privatization of natural assets. This is especially important with new markets we build, like this one. It will be critical to ensure that the companies buying these credits are taking meaningful, ambitious, transparent steps to reduce their negative impact on nature. It is also possible that companies take steps to calculate their historical nature debt, as Microsoft has done with its carbon debt and apply these credits towards past impact rather than ongoing impact – the latter of which should be reduced as significantly and expediently as possible.

We need more naturepreneurs. Through unleashing the creativity and problem-solving power of entrepreneurship we can drive bottom-up action while we simultaneously work on top-down changes. Entrepreneurs and their companies can bring much needed dynamism and inspiration to nature action, and indeed, many did just that at the COP this week. We need more investors, incubators, accelerators, and strategic venture studios focused on this space (and we need them to deploy blended finance).

Data and metrics

We need metrics for assessing economic progress aligned with the outcomes we want to deliver for people and the planet. The pursuit of GDP growth is killing the Earth. We need to direct our economies towards delivering well-being for people and health for ecosystems. I would like to see more inclusive democratic processes (notably citizens assemblies, like those The American Public Trust is organizing) feed into the design of new metrics on which we base our economic and financial policy. The UN is leading some cool work on this, but I think this process could benefit from input from non-experts.

We need a global dashboard for monitoring ecosystem health at the bioregional level and we need to have some serious conversations about data governance, ownership, and use. There is SO much cool work happening on nature data led by so many incredible individuals and organizations. I look forward to continuing to follow developments on this and doing some of my own work on restoration cost and benefit data. This information can empower a range of actors to reduce negative impacts on nature and to invest in conservation and regeneration. It can also empower citizens, consumers, communities, tribes, and governments (at every level) to better monitor the impacts of economic activity and hold actors accountable. There is a need, however, for a cross-sectoral, inclusive discussion on nature data governance. Data providers must ask themselves how the data that they provide; the format in which it is provided; and the tools, training, and communication supporting its use either reinforce or disrupt current power structures. Data ownership must be discussed, as private companies should not have access to granular data on the sovereign lands of indigenous peoples or local communities without their consent and/ or compensation. Additionally, this data should not be used to drive exploitation and privatization of natural assets.

Thinking beyond the bounds of nation-states

Indigenous tribes need to be more effectively included in UN and national processes and relevant negotiations and decision-making - particularly on issues related to nature. Indigenous peoples safeguard 80% of the world’s biodiversity even though they represent just 6% of the world’s population. Additionally, they have been receiving <1% of the funding for conservation, regeneration, and climate action. It is only through listening to and empowering them that we will be able to effectively conserve and regenerate life on Earth. Indigenous tribes and coalitions from all over the world brought extremely strong proposals to this COP and I hope the GBF will be the first UN agreement to recognize indigenous territories and will create mechanisms that effectively enable funding to flow to these groups. Indigenous tribes are strong stewards of biodiversity and in many places are lacking the resources they need to have sustainable livelihoods and access to modern medicine to support health in their communities, alongside their traditional practices (shoutout to the amazing work Health In Harmony is doing on this front).

There is an imperative to include bioregional targets in addition to national targets in global agreements. It was inspiring to see the Amazonia for Life call for the inclusion of a target to protect 80% of the Amazon by 2025 to avert a tipping point. Our ecosystems are the organs of the Earth and hold intelligence that evolved over billions of years that humans cannot live without. I see an imperative to take a global lens to how we prioritize and sequence the deployment of funding for conservation and regeneration. Taking a nation-state first approach to resource dissemination is not supportive of reaching the optimal provision of the ecosystem services provided by true global public goods. The GBF provides an opening to recognize global commons and to govern and fund them accordingly.

The oceans have received far too little attention in the GBF so far. More about this here . This is a missed opportunity and I hope that through other UN processes we can start to move towards governing the oceans through a common asset trust model as proposed by Robert Costanza , Ida Kubiszewski , and colleagues. This model is also applicable to a range of other biomes at the sub-national, national, regional, and global level.

Relationships and balance

We must remember that relationships are the foundation for life and effective solutions to the ecological crisis must be relational. Trying to quantify and commodify nature or focus on a single ecosystem service misses that the health of an ecosystem is rooted, not in the number of species or genetic diversity of the species there, nor the amount of carbon it stores and sequesters, but in the relationships between and within a species. Relationships are also critical to us achieving an ambitious GBF. The parties to the CBD and the individuals that represent them must trust each other and embrace reciprocity if we are to attain and implement a strong agreement. Shifting to this relational lens can help provide greater clarity in this work. Humility and acknowledging the limits of what can be meaningfully quantified is critical in ensuring integrity in the agreement and implementation. Likewise, the human relationship with nature must be central to conservation and regeneration planning. Indigenous leaders have emphasized again and again at the COP that we can’t and shouldn’t separate humans from nature. We are a part of nature. Implementation of the GBF must, therefore, support sustainable livelihoods for land and water stewards.

We have to balance our energy between working on incremental changes that can deliver quick wins and systemic changes that will take time to bear fruit. Finding the right balance between these is something I constantly struggle with internally, but strive to pay attention to. It can often feel as though systems are so rigid and politics so immobilizing that all we can do is push for the small wins that don’t rock the boat too much or force those that have amassed outsized amounts of power and resources to give something up. However, there is no path (in my view) to healing the Earth without the ultra-wealthy and powerful trading some wealth and power for belonging and collective health and safety. This is part of the healing. Centralization of power and inequality are at the root of the ecological crisis – they disconnect those at the top from the Earth and the rest of humanity. These issues must be addressed with the urgency that scientists are constantly reminding us is needed to save our species and prevent the destabilization of our societies and economies. Far too much of the discussion at COP15 was focused on incremental change within existing systems. I was fortunate, however, to be surrounded by some brilliant friends and colleagues who helped pull me out of the world of incrementalism and into the world of the possible where we could imagine a more beautiful, equitable, just, biodiverse, culturally rich, place-based, regenerative, and connected future and the revolutionary acts it will take to get us there.

Below are some links to resources and initiatives that were launched or discussed this week that inspired me:

Consultatively developed spatial conservation/ regeneration plans

• The Bioregional Plan for the Amazon Sacred Headwaters

Policies

• The Finnish Ministry of Finance’s integrated ‘Strategy on Climate and Nature’ which was informed by the nature risks and policy options report I co-authored for the Coalition of Finance Ministers for Climate Action -published earlier this year

Data initiatives

• The?SEED Biocomplexity Index
• Restor
• Nature Alpha
• eBio Atlas

Market-led initiatives

• The Biodiversity Credit Alliance
• Nature Action 100 (the launch of an idea FIONA STEWART and I proposed in our 2020 report and 2021 blog )

Models and tools

• The Nature Finance Alignment Tool
• GIST Impact's quantified nature impact measurement model
• Life Institute's impact and dependency measurement model
• The SITRA report, ‘Tackling root causes: Halting biodiversity loss through the circular economy ,’ which includes a modeling approach that assesses the extent to which biodiversity loss can be reduced from circular economy interventions

Investment landscape mapping

• Capital for Climate's NBS Investment Landscape Mapping

Nature and sovereign debt

• The Sustainability-Linked Sovereign Debt Hub

COP15 marks a pivotal moment in the history of humanity – a moment that feels like the majority of homo sapiens have become, or are becoming, aware of the critical need to change how we relate to the Earth through the economy. It was a privilege to be a part of these discussions and to meet so many thoughtful individuals pouring their hearts and minds into bending the curve of nature loss and driving a regeneration revolution. I will continue to follow the negotiations these next few days and am feeling cautiously optimistic. But no matter what governments deliver, we must continue to drive action at the grassroots level and in the private sector. Onwards!