Nele Marien, Friends of the Earth International
As biodiversity loss accelerates across the globe, the need to mainstream biodiversity as a central consideration in all public policy decisions has never been more urgent. The impacts of major economic sectors on nature remain unacceptably high and continue to grow. To safeguard the Earth's life-support systems and our collective future it is essential to make biodiversity a priority in all decision-making, particularly in economic, fiscal and financial policies.
Yet despite growing recognition of the need for policy alignment, significant barriers and challenges remain. Across sectors and levels of governance, governments continue to face obstacles in integrating biodiversity into decision-making, while ineffective approaches often persist. To make meaningful progress, Parties, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, rights holders, and civil society should work together to identify barriers, challenges and unhelpful approaches, which should provide the basis to develop future work to address them.
A second critical issue is ensuring clarity about where responsibility lies. Businesses may develop voluntary biodiversity initiatives, and while these could complement broader efforts, they are often constrained by limited transparency, inconsistent implementation, and a lack of accountability. What is more critical, overreliance on voluntary measures leads to a substitution of the robust policy and regulatory action needed to address the drivers of biodiversity loss.
The primary responsibility for aligning economic policies and development pathways with biodiversity rests with Parties to the Convention, which have both the mandate and the obligation to establish the policy and regulatory frameworks necessary to achieve the goals of the Global Biodiversity Framework. Given the global nature of economic activity, national regulation is only effective when anchored in internationally agreed regulatory baselines and frameworks. The CBD has a critical role to play in supporting this work.
The urgency of the biodiversity crisis demands nothing less.