Secure and Equitable, Nature Positive, Net Zero World

The science has never been clearer - systematic disregard for the environment and the rapid loss of biodiversity have pushed the natural world to its limits, helping trigger a planetary health crisis, and placing human health and livelihoods of current and future generations at risk.

Continued loss of nature threatens not only over half the global GDP, but also our opportunities to reduce social and gender inequalities, with the poorest and most vulnerable populations hit first and hardest. The loss of biodiversity and growing scarcity of natural resources, including through the expansion of resource extraction, insufficient political will, and sometimes exacerbated by armed conflict, undermines human security as it often leads to human rights abuses, including gender-based violence and violence against Indigenous Peoples and environmental defenders.

Reversing nature loss and addressing structural inequalities is therefore a moral responsibility. We must uphold nature’s spiritual, artistic and inherent values and rights of cultures, faiths and communities, and recognize the past and current contributions of Indigenous Peoples who have conserved much of the remaining biodiversity.

In the context of our dangerously unbalanced relationship with the planet, halting and rapidly reversing the loss of biodiversity to secure a nature-positive world by 2030 will also help avoid future global pandemics, fight climate change and land degradation, and enhance environmental security. It will also directly contribute to upholding human rights, including children’s rights, to adequate food, health, water and a healthy environment.

As non-state actors, we are deeply concerned at the lack of ambition among the government parties negotiating the first draft of the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) to effectively address the nature crisis. We all need and demand a strong Framework. One which acts upon commitments made in the Leaders Pledge for Nature and the G7 2030 Nature Compact Communiqué to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030.

Therefore, we are calling on governments to strengthen the first draft of the Global Biodiversity Framework ahead of CBD CoP 15 in Kunming to secure a nature-positive world by 2030, in support of climate action and the Sustainable Development Goals by:

• Including a nature-positive mission that commits the world to reverse biodiversity loss and improve the state of nature by 2030, against a 2020 baseline.

• Ensuring rights-based approaches: guaranteeing human rights, gender equality, Indigenous Peoples and local community rights, intergenerational equity, and recognizing children as equal stakeholders, ensuring their effective participation in decision-making processes.

• Ensuring rights-based approaches to nature-based solutions and to conserving 30% of land, freshwater, and seas by 2030.

• Directly tackling the drivers of nature loss - including unsustainable agricultural and food systems, forestry, fisheries, infrastructure, and extractives practices - by securing a just and sustainable transition that halves the impact of all that society produces and consumes by 2030.

• Committing adequate financial resources from all sources, and their appropriate allocation, including by eliminating all harmful subsidies by 2030.

• Securing a strong, effective, inclusive and transparent implementation mechanism that prioritizes bottom-up over top-down approaches, and that will allow for a ratcheting up of action over time.