Secure an Equitable, Nature Positive, Net Zero Emissions World

The Call To Action

From the air we breathe to the water we drink and the food we eat, nature provides the essentials we all rely on for our survival and well-being, including crucial economic, health, cultural and spiritual benefits.

Systematic disregard for the environment and the rapid loss of biodiversity have pushed the natural world to its limits. They helped trigger a planetary health crisis, 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 poverty and address social and gender inequalities. The loss of biodiversity and growing scarcity of natural resources, including through the expansion of unsustainable resource extraction, and sometimes exacerbated by armed conflict, undermine human security and often lead to human rights abuses, including gender-based violence and violence against Indigenous Peoples and environmental defenders.

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.

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.

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 government parties to strengthen the first draft of the Global Biodiversity Framework ahead of CBD CoP 15 in Montreal 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 and guaranteeing human rights, including safeguarding human rights defenders, gender equality, Indigenous Peoples and local community rights, children and youth rights, recognizing all as equal stakeholders and ensuring effective participation in the decision-making processes.
• Ensuring rights-based approaches to nature-based solutions and to conserving effectively and equitably 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. Aligning all public and private financial flows to a nature-positive world.
• 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.