New paper develops roadmap to integrate biodiversity into sustainable development targets
Before COVID-19 upended the world, many scientists and policymakers viewed 2020 as a pivotal year to focus on global biodiversity. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) community was set to review its progress in meeting the Aichi Biodiversity Targets established in 2010, and to chart a new set of targets for the coming decade. At the same time, the world is also entering the last decade of action to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
While these two 2020 milestones are inherently linked, biodiversity and ecosystem services (the benefits, values and contributions biodiversity make to sustainable development) remain undervalued and invisible in the SDG’s upcoming “Decade of Action.” One reason for this has been the current articulation of the SDG targets, which often omit or obscure the roles of biodiversity and ecosystem services.
A new paper in Nature Ecology & Evolution proposes new ways to fix this, to avoid repeating history. The paper's co-lead authors, Belinda Reyers and Elizabeth Selig, explained that their goal is to explore new types of targets that better capture the role of biodiversity and ecosystem services in sustainable development, which could then inform biodiversity and sustainable development target processes. This builds on their work on the Global Assessment of IPBES (the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services), where they assessed how trends in biodiversity and ecosystem services would affect the achievement of the SDGs.
Biodiversity and ecosystem services are at the heart of sustainable development
“Despite evidence that biodiversity and ecosystem services are relevant to all the Sustainable Development Goals, we ended up being able to assess the impacts of biodiversity loss in only 8 out of 16 SDGs, and for only less than half of the targets in these goals. This was quite a surprise. Even for obvious areas like climate or hunger, our ability to assess the consequences of biodiversity loss for these targets was very limited. This is a problem if we want to make sure that biodiversity loss is more visible in high-level SDG discussions going forward. We wanted to use this paper to address this challenge, and propose new directions for biodiversity targets so we don’t end up in the same situation 10 years from now,” says Reyers, from Future Africa at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
Co-lead author Elizabeth Selig, COS deputy director and member of the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s International Science Advisory Board, explains that a critical disconnect exists in how the targets are formulated. “This isn’t an issue of semantics or monitoring. Failing to recognize the links to biodiversity and ecosystem services in the targets can lead to a range of unintended consequences that will jeopardize longer-term progress toward the SDGs and could lead to deprioritizing investment in biodiversity and ecosystem services restoration. We should address these disconnects so that we can create the necessary knowledge, stewardship, and leverage points needed to integrate biodiversity and ecosystem services more effectively into sustainable development.”
While the UN’s 2030 Agenda proposes a unified plan for “people, planet and prosperity," the current goals, targets and indicators tend to treat social, economic and ecological aspects separately. The authors instead approached this problem from a social-ecological systems viewpoint. As Reyers points out: “It doesn’t make sense to study the separate social, ecological and economic systems of sustainable development and then try to reconstruct a holistic picture of sustainable development outcomes. Instead, we started from the perspective that we are dealing with an indivisible system of social-ecological interdependencies, where the outcomes for sustainable development are more than, or different to, the sum of its sectoral parts.”
Four recommendations for new biodiversity targets
The authors point to four new ways to better incorporate biodiversity and ecosystem services into the Convention on Biological Diversity targets for the new decade. Their first recommendation is to move beyond setting social or ecological targets, to also set social–ecological targets that focus on the specific aspect of ecosystem function required to support sustainable development priorities. For example, the Great Barrier Reef has had an ecosystem-based management approach for many years, which indicates that it is achieving the aims of target 14.2. At the same time, the Great Barrier Reefs’ integrity and function has been eroded by the loss of coral cover over years of mass bleaching due to climate change. A social-ecological target would focus on measuring the aspects of biodiversity that ensure the ability of the reef to support fisheries, coastal protection, and other key ecosystem services, rather than just the area of reef being managed or protected.
The authors’ second recommendation is to ensure that social-ecological targets account for the role of ecosystem services in sustainable development. For example, SDG target 1.5 aims to “build the resilience of the poor … to climate-related extreme events and other economic, social and environmental shocks and disasters,” but does not include linkages to the roles that ecosystems, including coastal ecosystems like mangroves and coral reefs, can play in mitigating those events. Similarly, ecosystem services need to be integrated into targets relating to food and water security, climate adaptation and mitigation, peace building and reducing inequalities.
The authors also recommend that new targets should account for social-ecological “feedbacks,” or the effects that human impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services may have on sustainable development outcomes. Current SDG targets ignore positive and negative biodiversity feedbacks. For example, target 14.3 focuses on reducing the impacts of ocean acidification, without acknowledging that ocean acidification itself is the result of a feedback from economic or land use activities releasing greenhouse gases. Developing targets that clarify these linkages and feedback effects of biodiversity loss not only emphasize the role of biodiversity, but would also more accurately identify leverage points for action.
Finally, the authors point to the need for targets that consider how different pathways like economic growth, infrastructure or renewable energy could substantially impact biodiversity. They encourage the CBD to consider how to create targets that go beyond global or national scales to capture cross-scale social-ecological feedbacks. Increasingly, the negative impacts on biodiversity, water, fisheries and food security in one place are distant from where positive benefits accrue.
“The CBD has a unique opportunity to move beyond the sectoral focus of current target frameworks to advance targets that capture the interdependencies between biodiversity, ecosystem services and human wellbeing. They are not only well placed to do so, but these interdependencies are central to their 2050 vision of Living in Harmony with Nature, as well as the 2030 Agenda. By clarifying the importance of biodiversity and ecosystem services to sustainable development, these recommendations can promote greater policy coherence and chart a path for more holistic sustainable development,” the authors conclude.
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