From the Pyramids to the Great Wall of China: the biodiversity convention at the crossroads

Renewing the global governance framework for biodiversity

Similarly to global warming, scientific evidence on the state of biodiversity is accumulating and showing that the situation is deteriorating. The “afflictions” it suffers from have been well understood for a long time: resource overexploitation, pollution, land use change, invasive species, and climate change. While the causes underlying these impacts largely relate to production and consumption practices: overfishing, agricultural intensification, extension of agricultural and urbanized areas, uncontrolled urban growth, and so on. Measures announced by States to address these issues have not as yet had sufficient scope to transform these modes of production, development and consumption. For this reason, the pursuit of a new post-2020 multilateral framework is underpinned by a general call for “transformative change”, terminology derived from the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Implicitly, this means that the new framework should identify areas of activity where change is most needed, and encourage action on these areas.

Unlike other negotiation arenas, sectoral transformation issues are explicitly recognized at the CBD and are regularly the subjects of discussion (such as the question of environmentally harmful subsidies, even though this topic is highly sensitive politically). Nevertheless, commitments made at the global level have insufficient impact at national and sectoral levels. The CBD is therefore facing a dilemma: how can we renew the way in which international discussions are held to trigger more transformative effects in the field?

The Paris Climate Agreement: a useful reference?

This question, central to the implementation of multilateral environmental treaties, has also been raised for the climate, for which the Paris Agreement and the decisions taken at the 2015 COP 21 were a response. The Paris Agreement is thus in the minds of all actors with an interest in the CBD, and its transposition to biodiversity is the vanishing point, the main current reference of the discussions carried out on governance framework. However, such a transposition in itself would not be a panacea.

For climate, as for biodiversity, governance through top-down goals (i.e. internationally agreed objectives to be developed and translated in each national jurisdiction) has not achieved the desired results. Regarding the climate, the Paris Agreement replaced this method, in part, with a hybrid approach, where global goals effectively apply to all (for example, maintaining warming well below 2°C, but also goals in terms of future emissions peaks, and “carbon neutrality” to be achieved in the second half of the century), but where a so-called bottom-up approach also allows each State to decide how it will/can contribute to the achievement of these global goals.

Ongoing discussions at the CBD indicate that the global Biodiversity Framework is also moving towards a hybrid form, with a call for submitting “voluntary contributions” prior to COP15. But only the “bottom-up” dimension of the Paris Agreement – which has yet to prove its effectiveness – seems to have been maintained. However, there were at least four components to the response designed for the climate:[1] (1) a top-down rationale with global objectives applying to all; (2) a bottom-up rationale with nationally determined contributions (NDCs); (3) a set of decisions regarding progress measurement and the way in which ambition will have to increase over time; and finally (4) an “action agenda”, which is civil society’s own mobilization, that was launched with sufficient time before COP21 to create a very strong political dynamic, and to take over, amplify and, in some cases, relay governmental action. In addition, the long-term goals for financing climate action (as well as other areas, such as the global goal for adaptation) played a key role in reaching an agreement.

For the climate, NDCs are only beneficial due to the fact that they are embedded into this overall architecture. For a system of national contributions to be useful for the global governance of biodiversity, mandatory conditions that go beyond the bottom-up rationale must be put on to the agenda and discussed as soon as possible. We note at least four discussion areas that must be urgently extended:

• Defining global goals. What global goals must we have, according to which we can determine whether States (or even non-state actors) are making sufficiently ambitious contributions or not? 
• Defining what commitments relate to. Since expected biodiversity outcomes cannot be measured by a single aggregated indicator (such as the level of greenhouse gas emissions for the climate), how should the indicators relevant to these commitments be designed? Could they focus more on the activities that result in biodiversity loss, rather than the transformations to be made?
• Measuring progress and reviewing commitments. What would be the process of reviewing and collectively assessing these commitments, and how would a gradual improvement rather than a regression be noticed?
• Creating a multi-stakeholder dynamic. How significant is the current momentum of commitment from civil society (companies, cities and regions, NGOs), which is likely to amplify and relay national policies, knowing that the “agenda of biodiversity action” has not yet been the subject of formal discussions?

It is therefore the overall coherence of the new framework, its own action rationale, that requires clarification prior to engaging the negotiations further on a “bottom-up” system of voluntary commitments by States. Otherwise, there would be a high risk of a formal and artificial transposition from one framework to another, which could allow for further regression, rather than improvement, of a multilateral framework.