Government and industry must adopt a strategic approach which puts nature at its heart

When did you last receive an invoice from a bee for pollination services?

When did the forest last invoice us for its flood protection?

Yet a decline in our forest cover can result in the destruction of our homes, — a decline in insect populations can affect the yield of our crops and our food security.

Nature is the foundation of everything we have and everything we value. But because classical economics treats the services that nature provides as externalities, it fails to properly represent either the non-market benefits of ecosystems or the environmental costs of growth.

We use nature because it is valuable. We Ab-use nature because it is free.

Today, we live in an age of planetary boundaries and tipping points where our Natural Capital has been eroded. The complex mechanism of ecosystem services that nature provides has been compromised and we now need to repair and sustain the earth’s ability to support us.

That, in simple terms, is what the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has been seeking to do since the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. It has been ratified by every member state of the United Nations with the exception of the United States. Its aims are the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources.

Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. The rate of species extinctions is actually accelerating, and that the impacts for people around the world are grave. In the UK the Office of Environmental Protection’s latest assessment of 40 individual environmental targets set under the Environment Act in 2021, found that we are on track to achieve just 4.

We have not made the progress we need.

But the CBD has established the Global Biodiversity Framework to halt this frightening state of decline.

It has four goals:
*To halt human-induced species extinction,
*To use biodiversity Sustainably
*To share the benefits of it equitably and
*To implement the finance of $700billion a year necessary to achieve the first three.

It also agreed 23 vitally important targets including the “30 By 30” target to conserve and protect 30% of the planets land, seas and inland waterways by 2030; and the reduction of perverse subsidies by $500Billion a year.

Sadly targets are easy to set, but difficult to implement – and even more difficult to enforce.

That is why the CBD has asked every country to develop a plan – a National Biodiversity and Sustainability Action Plan or NBSAP

Revised NBSAPs must be submitted in advance of the CBD Conference COP16 in Colombia this October. The UK originally committed to publishing ours in March of this year. Thankfully, they failed.
The change of government gives us time to radically revise the original draft which merely restated what the UK was already doing instead of providing the urgent and transformative action that is required to deliver on the four goals of the Global Biodiversity Framework.

The previous government did well to set legally binding targets to increase species abundance and decrease extinction risk – All the devolved administrations need to do so too. Most important, those targets must be matched with costed delivery plans.

No more silos! All public bodies must have a legal duty to help our natural environment recover. Government and industry must adopt a strategic approach when planning new energy infrastructure which puts nature at its heart; and we need mandatory reporting against the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures.

A Nature Positive, net zero future can only be delivered if actions for nature and climate are hard wired into decision making.

Our plan should be ambitious enough to show the UK is back taking a lead on the international stage with its commitment to implement climate and biodiversity solutions. And nowhere is this more true than in the international discussions about how to share the benefits of natural resources fairly and equitably. The issue of a digital sequencing information is about the establishment of a fund to share a part of the benefits made by sectors such as pharmaceutical and food production with the indigenous communities who have been the guardians of this pool of genetic resource for millennia.

I have called on our ministers to call a high-level summit with the Chief Executives of Big Pharma who are dragging their feet on this issue. We have four years in which to deliver the $200billion a year target that the international community set in 2010. It is time for Action.

To turbo-charge that action I hope the Prime Minister will announce that the UK is willing to host the next CBD COP, COP17, in London in 2026.

The fourth Goal set at COP15 was the Goal of Finance and Resource Mobilisation. Where better to make progress on the Financial framework for delivering our 2030 and 2050 targets than the City of London – The World’s Financial Centre.

Governments cannot do everything on their own. The role of the private sector in mobilising the resource of business and industry is absolutely vital. But it is for the new government to take a lead and bring about the global change we so urgently need.