Global Nature Positive Summit's refrain: We need action

by Amelia Young, National Campaigns Director

Right now, many political, business, and civil society leaders are in Cali, Colombia, at ‘COP 16’, the sixteenth UN conference of the parties about global biodiversity.

This important event is focussed on actions to implement the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which commits nations to meet 4 goals and 23 targets, to support nature to survive, and thrive.

Australia is a signatory to this agreement, which means governments and corporations must now be making different decisions when it comes to choices about impacting the natural world.

COP 16 neatly follows the world’s first Global Nature Positive summit, held in Sydney, on Gadigal Country, a few weeks ago.

While talking with a cross-section of delegates at the recent Global Nature Positive Summit, I heard a common refrain: we need action.

Importantly, the complexity, urgency and scope of the planetary nature crisis was well-established and well-accepted by participants at every workshop, plenary, panel, or event I attended at and around the Global Nature Positive Summit.

Yet, over the course of the summit, delegates increasingly noted the preponderance of ‘talk, about talking about, the need to take action…’ Something that may read like mental gymnastics, but at its heart is a demonstration that the baseline of recognition of the biodiversity crisis has shifted—and in the right direction. Now is the time for action.

A couple of weeks on from the Global Nature Positive Summit, three themes stand out from these conversations.

One: nature loss doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There are drivers for it. And while it may often be ‘out of sight, out of mind’, there are choices and decisions made, every day, that precipitate the loss of nature. Whether finance, insurance, siting, extraction, processing, transportation, retailing or procurement decisions.

Two: Looking into value chains to halt and reverse nature loss, is critical. That’s where the choices and decisions are made, every day that mean that Australia—let alone the world—is yet to halt, let alone reverse nature decline. These choice points are some of the most important levers to pull to get us to a nature positive future by 2030. So what’s informing those choices is critical.

Which brings me to the third theme: Data? There’s loads of it. A lack of data is not the issue, nor the constraint. Courage is required; combined with clarity on the next best step, and the confidence to take it, using the data that’s available, credible, and going to support nature positive decisions.