Despite commitments made by countries, biodiversity has further declined globally over the past decade. In December 2022, Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity will meet to determine the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.
In preparation for the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) negotiations, a group of experts were brought together in late 2021 under GeoBON and Future Earth, compiling a series of scientific briefs showing assessments and recommendations for select GBF targets and goals. The GBF is the new framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) that will guide interventions to conserve biodiversity and ecosystem services for the next 3 decades.
Drawing on these briefs, the authors, including Ülo Niinemets, Head of the Centre of Excellence EcolChange and Professor at the Estonian University of Life Sciences, have put together a series of companion pieces for the PLOS journals (as part of their emerging Policy Perspectives focus), representing selected aspects of these briefs. These include two in press for PLOS Sustainability and Transformation, on Ecosystems and Restoration respectively, and a third in press for PLOS Climate, on the Climate target in GBF.
These opinion articles seek to make the overarching messages from the scientific briefs more accessible within the GBF context, and to the broader scientific community. They highlight three areas where clarity and ambition will be needed to help reverse the decline of biodiversity:
1) Increasing natural ecosystem area by 2030 is one of the major objectives of the GBF. We show that halting natural ecosystem destruction by 2030 and restoration of more than 400 million hectares of degraded land (a little less than half the area of Canada) are key to meeting this objective. The contributions of individual countries to these global objectives should take into account the current state of their land.
2) The global target for ecosystem restoration needs an ambitious quantitative objective greatly exceeding 1 billion hectares (about the area of Canada or China). The experts explain why such a large fraction needs to have restoring biodiversity as a top priority.
3) Protecting natural ecosystems and restoring degraded natural and managed ecosystems can contribute between 5-10 GtCO2eq/year of climate mitigation (current fossil fuel emissions are about 35 GtCO2eq/year). Experts caution, however, that indiscriminant tree planting needs to be avoided, and that these efforts must respect biodiversity criteria and rights of local populations.
Two more papers are under review, addressing Sustainable Agriculture, and Sustainable Use of biodiversity. Altogether, and with other outputs from the same group, it is hoped this scientific support to the development of the GBF will help to align countries during the negotiation, and then facilitate integrated implementation of the targets in coming years.
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