This week, Heads of State and Government from 64 countries announced one of the strongest pledges yet to reverse the loss of biodiversity and nature’s contributions to people by 2030. Advancing from powerful pledges to concrete policy and action, however, means that nature must be moved to the heart of global, national and local decision-making. It’s time for nature to be reintegrated into everything we do.

Ana María Hernández Salgar

As a firm re-commitment to urgent action ahead of the United Nations Summit on Biodiversity, taking place today in New York and virtually around the world, it can be a vital and positive turning point towards the transformative change needed for people and nature – but this will require a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.

Biodiversity is the foundation of human life and well-being. When we destroy the natural world, we endanger our own lives and livelihoods. Effective action on nature must, therefore, be based on the best-available science and expertise – to properly understand our challenges and the options available for a better future.

The undertaking in the Leaders’ Pledge – that the design and implementation of policy will be science-based – is therefore extremely welcome. The science, evidence and expertise already exist in the IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services and other key IPBES reports.

It is evident, from the science, that we are living in an unsustainable downward spiral of land- and sea-use change, over-exploitation, pollution, climate change and invasive species – and that we are the cause. This drives the devastation of nature and directly impacts our own quality of life through food, health, the economy and even peace and security.

Placing nature at the center of decisions in key sectors – including agriculture, fisheries and forestry, energy, tourism, health, infrastructure, extractive industries, and trade – will help to end this vicious cycle. Nature makes invaluable material and non-material contributions to our lives across every sector of human development and activity. The whole of Government approach described in the Pledge is, therefore, grounded in solid science, and is absolutely necessary.

Sustainable use, wise management and effective conservation of natural resources – strengthened by the full and effective participation of indigenous peoples and local communities, are key components of a more effective and integrated approach.

The fact that the first-ever UN Summit on Biodiversity is taking place amidst the COVID-19 pandemic – is framing the urgency of our frayed relationship with nature in terms that make biodiversity loss extremely personal and undeniably significant. Humanity now stands at a crossroads for meaningful change. If we fail to take this opportunity to voluntarily change course, we risk entering uncharted waters where pandemics, for instance, are more likely and more devastating.

As the UN Secretary-General said during the UNGA75 High-Level Week, “solidarity is self-interest.” Our shared challenge – as leaders and citizens – is to rally around nature as our common ground and our common home – to recognize that nature itself contains most of the solutions to address our shared threats of biodiversity loss and climate change.

Perhaps the most encouraging element of the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature is the explicit commitment to meaningful action and mutual accountability, beyond words on paper. If we are to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and to build a sustainable future, we must leave behind the outdated ‘business-as-usual’ models, informed by the current, limited paradigm of economic grow at all costs.

We begin by rediscovering that nature is inextricably linked to every decision we make – in economic, social, political and technological spaces – and seizing this unprecedented opportunity to shift our world towards a more sustainable future, with nature at the heart of our approach.

As hundreds of the world’s leading scientists found, and intergovernmental representatives from more than 130 Member States agreed last May: “By its very nature, transformative change can expect opposition from those with interests vested in the status quo, but such opposition can be overcome for the broader public good.”

The author is Chair of IPBES

About IPBES:

IPBES is an independent intergovernmental body comprising 137 member Governments. Established by Governments in 2012, it provides policymakers with objective scientific assessments about the state of knowledge regarding the planet’s biodiversity, ecosystems and the contributions they make to people, as well as the tools and methods to protect and sustainably use these vital natural assets. To some extent IPBES does for biodiversity what the IPCC does for climate change. For more information about IPBES and its assessments visit www.ipbes.net

Credit: Remi Yuan / Unsplash

By Ana María Hernández Salgar
BONN, May 22 2020 (IPS)

Restoring damaged ecosystems is vital to avoid the collapse of nature’s most valuable contributions to people, but International Day for Biological Diversity 2020 should also be a wake-up call about the importance of addressing our social, economic and systemic values, because it is these that are driving the destruction of nature.

We are part of nature, but our choices and behaviours have pushed the rest of the natural world to the brink of disaster. Hunger, disease, loss of livelihoods and rising levels of risk and insecurity are the direct result of our own actions. To shift to a more sustainable future, the best-available expert evidence tells us that we need transformative change to reset our fundamental relationship with our environment.

This will require us to tackle the nature and climate emergencies directly and simultaneously, uniting behind both climate and biodiversity science. We have already hit ‘snooze’ for too many decades on the warnings of experts from every discipline and every region – further delays are entirely at our own peril.

Transformative change means a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors. It means addressing not just the direct and most visible threats to biodiversity – such as land-use change, overfishing, pollution, climate change and invasive alien species – but also tackling the values and behaviours that find expression through indirect drivers such as population trends, production and consumption patterns, weak governance and conflicts.

The way we lead our lives and do business has effectively been freeloading on the bounty that nature contributes to people, taking for granted the natural processes that revitalize our environment. Instead of living within our means, we’ve been using up more and more ‘natural capital’ – well beyond what nature can replenish – and it’s a debt that is now past due. This is one of the reasons that the World Economic Forum’s latest Global Risks Report recognized that the top five risks to business around the world are all environmental.

Ana María Hernández Salgar

The good news, however, is that many sustainable solutions to these problems can also be found in nature – and are, therefore, still within reach. The efforts that many countries, organizations, communities and institutions have already put into recovering biodiversity are beginning to bear fruit.

It is important for us to learn from these good examples, and from our mistakes, to chart a realistic and rigorous path, with concrete actions, but based on our different national and regional circumstances.

Investing in nature holds great promise. Nature-based solutions to climate change, for instance, such as restoring degraded lands, can provide more than a third of the mitigation needed by 2030 to keep climate warming well below 2°C.

Implementing both existing and new policy instruments through interventions that are integrative, informed, inclusive and adaptive will enable the global transformation that we need.

Coordinated action at local, national, regional, and international levels is needed to safeguard remaining habitats, undertake large-scale restoration of degraded habitats, and more broadly to place nature at the heart of decision-making and sustainable development.

Importantly, this will also entail a change in our understanding of what constitutes a good quality of life – decoupling the idea of a good and meaningful life from ever-increasing material consumption and forging individual, collective and organizational actions towards sustainability.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an unavoidable delay in the planned global negotiations on the post-2020 framework for biodiversity, but 2020 is still a “Super Year for Nature”. The world has had the chance this year to see very directly the importance of changing values, approaches and behaviours, and to better understand the vital connection between people and nature.

After this crisis we will confront a ‘new normal’ – hopefully this will also be a watershed moment with values, approaches and behaviours – the indirect drivers of change in nature – at the forefront of policy and action.

The available evidence makes it clear that going back to ‘business as usual’ – ignoring our collective impacts on nature – would be a grave mistake.

The burning question on this day to commemorate the importance of nature is if and when we will change and seriously face the emergencies unfolding around us.

Enquiries: media@ipbes.net

Ana Maria Hernandez is the Chair of IPBES – the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which, much like the IPCC does for climate change, provides objective scientific assessments about the state of knowledge regarding the planet’s biodiversity, ecosystems and the contributions they make to people, as well as options and actions to protect and sustainably use these vital natural assets.