Everywhere everything
all at once

Humans are part of these interactions as much as any other living thing. Yet we have lived, in particular in the West since the dawn of the industrial revolution, as if the Earth and its resources are there for our taking.

Western theology is “upfront in flaunting ‘mankind’s’ mastery and exploitation of the earth, arguing it’s a gift of an all-knowing God who granted Adam and Eve and their heirs dominion over it,” writes US economist and author Jeremy Rifkin in his 2022 book The Age of Resilience: Reimagining Existence on a Rewilding Earth. Eastern religions and philosophies are “more nuanced,” argues Rifkin, “positing that humanity is not the master of nature, but an intricate part of it. In practice, however, “the great Asian civilisations have often strayed” and their “usurpation and exploitation” of the earth’s resources have also ballooned in recent times.

The idea the Earth and its resources are there for our taking is slowly losing currency as the negative impacts of living in such a manner become apparent and the complicated interactions between people and the rest of the planet become ever more obvious. The growing move towards Earth Jurisprudence is one example of this change in thinking.

First articulated by Catholic priest and historian Thomas Berry, who died in 2009, the concept of Earth Jurisprudence advocates a reexamination of the philosophy and values underpinning our legal and governance systems to shift them from being anthropocentric to ecocentric in focus. In other words, it supports a move from placing human beings above other forms of life to valuing all of nature equally and recognising nature for its inherent value as well as its benefits for humans.

There is a long way to go before humans begin to live within the planetary boundaries within which scientists say we can continue to develop and thrive for generations to come, but perhaps for the first time we are aware of the destruction we are causing and there is a growing will to do something about it.

The simultaneous occurrence of several catastrophic events

The term “polycrisis” is indicative of the growing consensus about the interconnectedness of our world. Coined by the French philosopher and complexity theorist Edgar Morin and co-author Anne Brigitte Kern in the late 1990s to describe “interwoven and overlapping crises”, “polycrisis” was the buzzword of the 2023 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos and has since been used by various experts to describe the state of the world and its challenges from the climate emergency, to soaring energy and commodity prices since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the sixth mass extinction.

In recent years, climate change has been considered the biggest environmental issue facing the world, but scientists and policy makers now accept the parlous state of nature is equally alarming and needing of attention. Worldwide, wildlife populations have dropped nearly 70 per cent in the last 50 years, shows WWF data.

Indeed, the second New Nature Economy Report published by WEF in 2020 estimates that over half of global GDP, to the tune of $44 trillion, is potentially threatened by nature loss. A report from April 2023 by consultants PwC estimated this figure to be even higher, suggesting more than half of the world’s GDP, equivalent to $58 trillion, is dependent on nature.

The New Nature Economy Report advocates a fundamental transformation across three socioeconomic systems, namely, food, land and ocean use; infrastructure and the built environment; and energy and extractives, to address the nature crisis. Radical change would protect and restore biodiversity, and could trigger annual business opportunities worth $10 trillion and create 395 million jobs by 2030, argues WEF.

“If we give nature a chance, it will bounce back,” insisted Andersen at the end of COP15. Yet, ending what Guterres terms “the orgy of destruction” of the last 100 years needs full and immediate buy-in from politicians, businesses, banks, investors, farmers and the general public, and this is still far from being the case.

“Complex systems have thresholds,” warns UK environmentalist and author George Monbiot in his 2022 book Regenesis. “They can absorb a certain amount of change without altering the way they behave, then suddenly their self-organisation breaks down and they collapse.”

“We are treating nature like a toilet.”

— António Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations.

Turning promising pledges into ambitious actions

The 2015 Paris Agreement is seen by many as the moment governments realised it was time to get serious about climate change. Since then the roll out of renewable energy infrastructure has ramped up and countries around the world have stepped up actions to tackle climate change. 2022 was a record year for global renewable energy installations with the stock of renewable power growing by 9.6 per cent, shows data from the International Renewable Energy Agency. Over 80 per cent of all power capacity added last year was produced by renewables, says Irena. Yet, the International Energy Agency insists annual renewable energy use needs to reach an average rate of about 13 per cent during the period 2022-2030 to meet the Paris goals. As things stand, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise and temperatures are set to surge well above 1.5°C and even 2°C.

The Global Biodiversity Framework, agreed at COP15, is considered a similarly groundbreaking moment in terms of its ambitions and the support it garnered — while signed off by governments, it was backed by 330 business and finance institutions, with combined revenues of more than $1.5 trillion. Like the Paris Agreement, it remains to be seen, however, if governments and the private sector are ready to turn paper pledges into concrete actions at the speed needed to stabilise the system.

Under the Framework, governments agreed by 2030 to protect 30 per cent of the Earth’s lands, oceans, coastal areas and inland waters, compared to the 17 per cent of terrestrial and 10 per cent of marine areas under protection today.

Policy makers also pledged, by the same date, to progressively phase out or reform subsidies that harm biodiversity by at least $500 billion a year and to scale up positive incentives for biodiversity’s conservation and sustainable use.

Likewise, countries agreed to mobilise by 2030 at least $200 billion a year in domestic and international biodiversity-related funding from public and private sources, and to raise international financial flows from developed to developing countries to at least $20 billion a year by 2025 and to at least $30 billion a year by 2030.

The Global Biodiversity Framework is hugely ambitious

Today, land-use change — urbanisation and the conversion of forests and other nature-rich habitats into farmland — is the most important driver of biodiversity loss. The failure to limit global warming to less than 2°C is, however, likely to make climate change the dominant driver of biodiversity loss in the coming decades, warns the WWF’s Living Planet report. That the world is off track in terms of its climate commitments, as the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from March 2023 shows, is also bad news for nature.

The European Union is the most advanced jurisdiction globally in terms of legislation aimed at protecting biodiversity — the bloc is negotiating a nature restoration law and certain recent commitments, like the EU regulation on deforestation-free products agreed in December 2022, go further than simply protecting biodiversity within its borders.

At the same time, however, while some European countries are happy to sign on to pledges to protect nature in general, they are more reluctant to entertain changes to rules governing fishing and agriculture, for instance, that would ban destructive practices and give much greater support to farmers acting to protect soils, waterways, habitats and different species of flora and fauna.

Solving global problems with local nature-based solutions

The 23 action targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework cover the gamut of solutions needed to ensure that such policy contradictions become a thing of the past.

Nature-based solutions, or using biodiversity to help solve problems like climate change, increase food security or improve human health, while also bringing a positive economic impact, is gaining in currency as a rare win-win option. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) estimates a third of the climate mitigation actions needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement can be provided by nature-based solutions (NbS).

Such solutions can come in many forms. The World Bank, which is increasingly engaged in the space, has since 2018, for example, supported projects in Burundi to replant vegetation on bare hillsides to control soil erosion, increase soil moisture and reduce runoff — actions that will help the land cope better with climate change induced extreme weather, restore nature and make the land more productive for farming. Likewise, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, the bank has, for over 10 years, supported the restoration of wetlands to protect wildlife, reduce the risk of city flooding and help tackle climate change since wetlands also sequester carbon.

For nature-based solutions to achieve their full potential, however, financing needs a significant boost, concludes the second State of Finance for Nature report published by UNEP, in December 2022. It calls for investment in nature to double by 2025 and for an end to nature-negative finance flows. Finance flows to nature-based solutions today are $154 billion a year, less than half of the $384 billion a year needed by 2025 and only a third of the investment needed by 2030 to “limit climate change to below 1.5°C, halt biodiversity loss and achieve land degradation neutrality,” says the report.

Private sector investment must increase

Private sector investment in nature-based solutions must increase “by several orders of magnitude in the coming years,” insists UNEP, compared to the $26 billion a year today, which represents around 17 per cent of total nature-based solutions investment. While philanthropic capital and carbon markets have grown since the inaugural State of Finance for Nature report in 2021, impact investment and investment in sustainable supply chains have increased very little, says UNEP. It also criticises the “myriad of net zero and deforestation-free commitments made by agri-food companies, banks and investors, which have seen too little action and too little capital deployed”.

“Voluntary business commitments without a time-bound plan or roadmap for implementation are not acceptable,” states the report, underlining that investment needs to be directed towards a variety of projects, including reforestation; the restoration of seagrass, peatlands, saltmarshes and mangroves; and agroforestry.

Another significant issue is that “nature-negative expenditures» continue to “far outweigh” investments in nature-based solutions, says UNEP. It estimates government expenditure on environmentally harmful subsidies to fisheries, agriculture and fossil fuels at $500 billion to $1 trillion a year, a sum three to seven times greater than public and private investments in nature-based solutions. “While robust evidence is lacking, it is widely recognised that private finance flows are predominantly negative for nature and almost certainly exacerbate the situation,” adds the report.

To turn this situation around, “it is critical to rapidly align policies, regulation, economic activity and financial flows with biodiversity values and with the Paris Agreement,” says UNEP. “Public and private actors need to mobilise the necessary finance and close the finance gap while governments anchor targets in national regulation/legislation.”

Proper regulation for smart financing

“To scale up private finance, governments can boost the investment case for nature, for instance by creating stable and predictable markets for ecosystem services like forest carbon or by using public money on below-market rates,” said Ivo Mulder, head of UNEP’s Climate Finance Unit, at the launch of the nature-based solutions report. “Systemic changes are needed at all levels, including consumers paying the true price of food, taking into account its environmental footprint. Companies and financial institutions should fully disclose climate- and nature-related financial risks, and governments need to repurpose agricultural fiscal policies and trade-related tariffs.”

Why nature needs to go mainstream

For Seega, the real question is not so much what new regulations and international commitments will come into play in the coming years and their impacts on the climate and nature and the behaviour of the private sector, but whether and how environmental issues are mainstreamed across existing legislation, including in purely financial rules and regulations.

Evans makes a similar point. She describes the EU’s recently agreed deforestation-free products law — which will ban access to its markets for goods like cocoa, coffee, soy, wood, palm oil, rubber and cattle if companies cannot prove they are not linked to forest degradation — as a “great driver” to stop investment in products and practices that negatively impact nature.

Likewise, Australia’s consumer and financial regulators are starting to crack down on greenwashing, and the UK and the EU are both passing legislation that will make it more difficult for companies to make claims about their environmental credentials unless they can be backed up by science.

“The state of biodiversity would have been much worse in the absence of conservation action,” says IUCN’s Brooks. “Recent work has shown that bird and mammal extinction rates over the last 30 years would have been three to four times higher in the absence of conservation efforts.”

Going forward, Brooks insists it is not just legislation per se that is the key to success, but also “tracking progress relative to what would have been anticipated to have happened otherwise” to ascertain “the genuine impact of conservation”. Using spatial documentation to check if actions are delivering on the goals promised is also vital, he adds. “These two best practice examples can be applied to any conservation action, including solutions-based campaigning, to examine whether it is having the desired impact, and whether it is necessary to increase it,” says Brooks.

Forge a peace treaty with nature

In Indonesia, for example, IUCN recently applied its species threat abatement and restoration (STAR) metric. This tool can be used by businesses, governments or civil society to track the contribution of actions to protect biodiversity locally and globally, and to set appropriate targets. By applying STAR to an 88,000-hectare commercial rubber initiative in central Sumatra, the rubber company could see that by reducing threats to biodiversity from crop production, logging and hunting, the extinction risk to species like tigers, Asian elephants and leaf-nosed bats (which are only found in the region) could be reduced by 0.2 per cent across Sumatra, 0.04 per cent across Indonesia and 0.003 per cent globally.

As COP15 opened, António Guterres said humanity’s treatment of nature was akin to “committing suicide by proxy”. Upon the signing of the Biodiversity Framework, he suggested “we are finally starting to forge a peace pact with nature”.

Jeremy Rifkin too is optimistic that humanity is ripe for change, describing a journey from the Age of Progress to the Age of Resilience that will “steer us to a new Garden of Eden, but this time not as master but as kindred spirit with our fellow creatures with whom we share our earthly home”.

Ambitious global targets have been set

There are many reasons to feel positive about the future of nature. It is now firmly on the agenda of international organisations, individual countries and corporates, who increasingly understand the effects of human action on the natural world and who now appreciate the interconnection between global issues such as climate change and biodiversity.

Ambitious global targets have been set and commitments made to additional funding. Furthermore, the private sector is now focused on the issues, and a combination of Nature based Solutions and investors willing to participate, is leading to innovation in a previously overlooked area.

However, there is still much to be done with targets and funding falling short of what is needed and ongoing discussion around regulation and market practices. Nonetheless, the recognition of the importance of nature and its parlous state is a first important step in the quest to save and preserve the natural world. FW