Mainstreaming the Ambition, Coherence, and Comprehensiveness of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework Into Conservation Policy

Abstract

Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are finalizing a new Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) to more effectively guide efforts by the world’s nations to address global loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services. Each party is required to mainstream the new framework and its component targets into national conservation strategies. To date, such strategies have been criticized as largely aspirational and lacking clear linkages to national policy mechanisms, which has contributed to the world’s general failure to meet the Convention’s previous targets. We use the United States and European Union as examples to compare and contrast opportunities and barriers for mainstreaming the GBF more effectively into policy. The European Union and United States have unique relationships to the Convention, the former being the only supranational party and the latter, having signed but never ratified the treaty, adopting Convention targets on an ad hoc basis. The contrasting conservation policy frameworks of these two polities illustrate several conceptual issues central to biodiversity conservation and demonstrate how insights from the GBF can strengthen biodiversity policy even in atypical contexts. We focus on three characteristics of the GBF which are essential if policy is to effectively motivate and guide efforts to halt and reverse biodiversity loss: comprehensiveness, coherence, and ambition. Statutes in both the United States and European Union provide a strong foundation for mainstreaming the GBF’s comprehensiveness, coherence, and ambition, but policy development and implementation falls short. We identify six common themes among the reforms needed to successfully achieve targets for reversing biodiversity loss: broadening conservation focus to all levels of biodiversity, better coordinating conservation strategies that protect sites and landscapes with those focused on biodiversity elements (e.g., species), coordinating biodiversity conservation with efforts to safeguard ecosystem services including ecosystem-based climate mitigation and adaptation, more coherent scaling of targets from global to local extents, adoption of a more ambitious vision for recovery of biodiversity, and development of effective tracking and accountability mechanisms.

Four challenges to an effective national nature assessment

“…The field of biodiversity research is also chronically underfunded; the NNA can help identify priorities for filling key data gaps within existing biodiversity inventories and invest in long-term infrastructure to maintain and provide access to biodiversity data (OSTP, 2022;Schulman et al, 2021). In coordination with related efforts such as the American the Beautiful (30x30) initiative's Conservation and Stewardship Atlas (USDOI, 2021), the NNA can support spatial planning for biodiversity conservation and climate solutions, both within land management agencies' regional assessments and at smaller extents, helping ensure that proposed nature-based climate solutions do not undermine biodiversity goals (Lubchenco et al, 2022;Carroll et al, 2022;CEQ, 2022). The NNA's second and equally important role is to broadly communicate "what's at stake" if loss of nature continues unabated.…”

“…Recent reviews have highlighted the importance of more comprehensive tracking of population abundance and trends to complement (and contribute to) indicators of species extinction risk and intraspecific diversity (Carroll et al, 2022;Cavender-Bares et al, 2022). The NNA should incorporate existing datasets on population trends, such as the North American Breeding Bird Survey and state breeding bird atlases (Cavender-Bares et al, 2022).…”

“…All rights reserved. 10 policy, US conservation statutes acknowledge the importance of retaining multiple abundant populations located across a range of ecological settings, which facilitates retention of genetic diversity (Stein et al, 2000;Carroll et al, 2022). By incorporating data on species' distribution and abundance, the NNA could track proxies for intraspecific diversity (e.g., number of ecoregions within historic range with extant populations of a species), in addition to incorporating recent research on delineating units for conserving genetic diversity (Hoban et al, 2022), and existing agency policy for assessment of species' resilience, redundancy, and representation (the '3R' framework; Stein et al, 2000).…”

Ten Steps to an Effective National Nature Assessment

“…In coordination with related efforts such as the American the Beautiful (30x30) initiative's Conservation and Stewardship Atlas, the NNA can support spatial planning for biodiversity conservation and nature-based climate solutions, both within land management agencies' regional assessments and at smaller extents (Carroll et al 2022). By providing a big picture of species status and trends, the NNA can provide context that can make conservation efforts for individual species more successful.…”

“…Recent reviews have highlighted the importance of more comprehensive tracking of population abundance and trends both to complement and contribute to indicators of 9 extinction risk (Carroll et al 2022, Cavender-Bares et al 2022. The NNA should incorporate existing datasets on population trends, such as the North American Breeding Bird Survey and state breeding bird atlases, recognizing that the number of taxa for which robust population trend data is available is severely limited (Cavender-Bares et al 2022).…”