Abstract
AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic, its impact on the global economy, and current delays in the negotiation of the post‐2020 global biodiversity agenda of the Convention on Biological Diversity heighten the urgency to build back better for biodiversity, sustainability, and well‐being. In 2019, the Intergovernmental Science‐Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) concluded that addressing biodiversity loss requires a transformative change of the global economic system. Drawing on the IPBES findings, this policy perspective discusses actions in four priority areas to inform the post‐2020 agenda: (1) Increasing funding for conservation; (2) redirecting incentives for sustainability; (3) creating an enabling regulatory environment; and (4) reforming metrics to assess biodiversity impacts and progress toward sustainable and just goals. As the COVID‐19 pandemic has made clear, and the negotiations for the post‐2020 agenda have emphasized, governments are indispensable in guiding economic systems and must take an active role in transformations, along with businesses and civil society. These key actors must work together to implement actions that combine short‐term impacts with structural change to shift economic systems away from a fixation with growth toward human and ecological well‐being. The four priority areas discussed here provide opportunities for the post‐2020 agenda to do so.
Highlights
The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed discussions on the post-2020 biodiversity agenda, with the 15th Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity delayed to the end of 2021
We identify four priority areas for these actions: (1) Increasing capital investment in nature conservation and biodiversityenhancing production; (2) redirecting economic incentives away from damaging activities and towards natureenhancing actions; (3) creating enabling regulatory frameworks to ensure the effectiveness of increased investments and realigned incentives; and (4) reforming metrics to measure, value, and catalyze these transformative shifts and their impacts on human and ecological well-being
A coherent strategy is needed that combines actions with short-term positive impacts such as redirecting subsidies, with those that will facilitate deeper structural transformation such as the introduction of new metrics
Summary
The COVID-19 pandemic has slowed discussions on the post-2020 biodiversity agenda, with the 15th Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity delayed to the end of 2021. Our current economic system has achieved a quadrupling of global GDP over the past 50 years (Otero et al, 2020) This remarkable growth has come at the cost of widespread biodiversity loss and marked increases in greenhouse emissions (IPBES, 2019; Otero et al, 2020), while simultaneously generating a highly unequal distribution of benefits (Jackson, 2017). We identify four priority areas for these actions: (1) Increasing capital investment in nature conservation and biodiversityenhancing production; (2) redirecting economic incentives away from damaging activities and towards natureenhancing actions; (3) creating enabling regulatory frameworks to ensure the effectiveness of increased investments and realigned incentives; and (4) reforming metrics to measure, value, and catalyze these transformative shifts and their impacts on human and ecological well-being These four priority areas involve actions that have been proposed previously, we foreground the need for a more holistic strategy that combines concrete measures with structural changes. Profound transformative change will only be possible with the market, state, and civil society actors working together on these priority areas simultaneously
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