In this issue:
Nele Mariën, Friends of the Earth International - Last week, IPBES approved the Business and Biodiversity Assessment. The report offers a comprehensive synthesis on the interlinkages between business activity and biodiversity loss. It analyses how businesses depends on and impacts biodiversity.
There is much to welcome. The assessment documents in detail how corporate activities across sectors – from agribusiness and mining to infrastructure and finance – are major direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss. It also shows that regulatory frameworks, when well designed and enforced, are among the most effective measures for shifting corporate behaviour.
CBD Women’s Caucus - The current mid-tem review of the Gender Plan of Action reveals significant data gaps that limit a systematic assessment of progress and can limit the accountability and effectiveness of its implementation through 2030. A comprehensive, evidence-based end-of-term assessment integrated with the global review of the Eighth National Reports at COP19, is essential to clearly identify progress, gaps, resource needs, and the critical contributions of women to the KM-GBF.
Commentary by Meenal Tatpati, Lawyer and Researcher - The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) promises a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to halting biodiversity loss. Yet, as preparations advance for the first Global Report, discussions since the resumed session of COP 16 in Rome, to SBSTTA 27 and right up to the webinar by the SCBD in early February this year which aimed at introducing the Online Reporting Tool for submission of commitments from actors other than National governments have revealed growing tensions around whether their commitments are going to be recognised.
Shona Hawkes, Rainforest Action Network - One of the five strategies highlighted in the IPBES Transformative Change Assessment is transforming economic sectors for nature and equity, including the sub-strategy of transforming financial systems. Indeed, the world has an opportunity to reverse the billions, if not trillions, of dollars in private finance driving the biodiversity crisis. But this requires facing some basic truths.
