Will next year be a big one for biodiversity?

The Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework: From Aichi 2010 to Kunming 2020

By Peter Burnett

Next year might be a big year for biodiversity. At least, I would like to think so. In February, almost every nation on the planet is meeting in Kunming, China, to discuss how well they are doing at conserving biodiversity. Which is just as well as earlier this year the UN issued its latest report suggesting we are witnessing an biodiversity catastrophe with a million species threatened with extinction.

The upcoming event in Kunming is a meeting of the nations (parties) which signed up to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). That’s 196 nations, almost everyone except the USA*. The February meeting is in preparation for the 15^th Conference of the Parties (or COP 15) to be held in October.

‘COP’ is an arcane diplomatic acronym that is, unfortunately, entering the mainstream as the annual climate COPs held under the Climate Change Convention become increasingly desperate for real progress as time runs out.

COP this for biodiversity

But I digress. For the CBD, the main task of COP 15 is to adopt a new ten-year strategic plan for biodiversity. The current ten year plan, known as the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and which includes a set of ‘Aichi Biodiversity Targets’, is about to expire. With 2020 looming it’s time for a new plan and targets. These have the working title of the ‘Post-2020 Biodiversity Framework’.

But let’s not be too hasty to move on. What were the Aichi Targets and will Australia meet them?

I’ve had a quick look at key targets and Australia’s progress. These are discussed below. Progress can be hard to gauge though. The usual scarcity of information is made even worse by the fact that Australia’s Sixth CBD National Report is nearly 12 months overdue, which in itself suggests this task is a low priority for the Australian Government.

Each of the 20 Aichi Targets falls under one of five strategic goals:

Goal A: Mainstreaming

Strategic goal A deals with the ‘mainstreaming’ of biodiversity. This term may sound contemporary, but it’s pretty much a rehash of the concept of ‘policy integration’ from the 1987 Brundtland report, which gave birth to the concept of sustainable development and to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the meeting at which the CBD was born also.

Targets for mainstreaming include the insertion of biodiversity into national plans of various kinds. This includes Target 2, which talks of extending national accounting and reporting systems to address biodiversity.

Superficially, Australia’s environment ministers look to be on the ball in regards to this target. They have agreed on a national plan in 2018 to develop environmental-economic accounts. In reality, this is a small drop in the bucket and it comes more than 25 years after Australian government first agreed on the potential of ‘proper resource accounting’, and nearly 50 years after Barry Commoner proposed as the first law of ecology, that ‘everything is connected to everything else’.**

Accounting aside, we haven’t even attempted national baseline monitoring of biodiversity, decades after governments first committed to it, so even if we designed a good set of accounts we’d be short of data with which to populate them.

Goal B: Reducing pressures and promoting sustainable use

Goal B deals with reducing direct pressures and promoting sustainable use. Key targets under this goal include halving the rate of habitat loss; making farming and fishing sustainable; and minimising the pressures on coral reefs, to maintain their integrity and functioning.

In Australia we haven’t even reduced habitat loss, let alone halved it. And while fishing is one area where we score reasonably well, we haven’t done nearly so well with farming and our attempts to reduce pressures on the Great Barrier Reef have made no discernible impact. On the contrary, the authority responsible for the Reef has downgraded its outlook from ‘poor’ to ‘very poor’.

Goal C: Safeguarding biodiversity

This goal deals with safeguarding ecosystems, species and genetic diversity; traditionally, these three components are used to measure biodiversity. The targets contained in this goal include having 17% of terrestrial areas and 10% of marine areas in ecologically representative and well-connected protected areas (ie, 17% of Australia’s land within a protected area and 10% of our sea).

This goal also includes the highly ambitious aim of improving the conservation status of our threatened species (as well as halting their extinction).

When Australia gets around to submitting its Sixth National Report, we’ll no doubt blow our trumpet about meeting the percentage targets for protected areas, but we won’t have gone close to the ensuring that they are representative and well-connected, at least on land.

And we can’t even measure a turnaround in the conservation status of threatened species, except at the very coarse level of counting new and changed listings. Even at this coarse level, things have declined rather than improved.

Goal D: Enhancing benefits to people

The aim of Goal D is to enhance the benefits to people from biodiversity and ecosystem services, including by restoring and safeguarding ecosystems that provide essential services such as water.

A recent positive example from Australia is the Victorian Government’s decision to phase out logging of native forests. This decision was influenced in part by a 2017 study led by ANU academic Heather Keith and based on a specially-prepared set of environmental-economic accounts.

The study revealed that native forests would provide greater benefits through the ecosystem services of carbon sequestration, water yield, habitat provisioning and recreational amenity if harvesting for timber production ceased and forests were allowed to grow to older ages.

Goal E: Better planning, knowledge

Finally, Goal E is concerned with enhancing implementation through planning, knowledge management and capacity-building. The Aichi targets under this goal include showing respect for traditional knowledge and encouraging the full participation of Indigenous communities in biodiversity conservation and use.

I’m not aware of much progress in Australia in this area, but the emphasis given to Indigenous knowledge and participation in a recent discussion paper on the review of Australia’s national environmental law [link: https://epbcactreview.environment.gov.au ]did make me wonder whether the Government might have some appetite for improvement in this area.

A colleague in Indigenous studies commented that with the Government having appointed Australia’s first Indigenous minister for Indigenous Affairs, but not keen on implementing proposals to recognise Indigenous Australians in the nation’s Constitution (see the Uluru ‘Statement from the Heart’, they might be keen to deliver some reforms here to avoid leaving their minister with a thin record of achievement. I think he might be right.

Beyond Aichi: what can we expect from the ‘Yunnan Targets’?

So for Australia at least, the limited evidence suggests a weak record of achievement under the Aichi targets.

Chances are that many other countries will find themselves in a similar position. Yet experience also suggests that countries will also be too embarrassed to simply sideline biodiversity targets as too hard.

The path of least resistance would be to say ‘we’ll do better next time’ and adopt a set of ‘Yunnan Targets’*** for 2030. There is likely to also be some discussion on aligning the Yunnan Targets with the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. In diplomacy, if you can’t win the war, the next best option is to simply declare victory and charge on …

* The USA isn’t a member because President George Bush (senior) wouldn’t sign and his successor, Bill Clinton, couldn’t get ratification through the US Senate.

** Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (Random House, 1971).

*** Targets are normally named after the region in which they were drawn up. The Aichi Targets were drawn up in the Japanese city of Nagoya, which is in the province of Aichi. The Yunnan Targets will be drawn up in the city of Kunming, which lies in the Chinese province of Yunnan.