Renewing the global governance framework for biodiversity
The Paris Climate Agreement: a useful reference?
- a top-down logic with global goals that apply to everyone;
- a bottom-up logic with contributions determined at the national level (CDN) ;
- a set of decisions on how to measure progress and how ambitions should increase over time;
- and finally an "agenda for action", a mobilization of civil society itself, launched sufficiently in advance of COP21 to create a very strong political dynamic, and to take up, amplify and even, in some cases, relay government action.
- Set global goals. What should be contributed to, i.e., what global targets, against which the contributions of states (or even non-state actors) could be judged to be sufficiently ambitious or not?
- Define what the commitments would cover. Since expected biodiversity outcomes cannot be measured by a single aggregated indicator (such as the level of greenhouse gas emissions for climate), how should the indicators covered by these commitments be specified? Could they be designed to focus instead on the activities involved in biodiversity loss and change?
- Measure progress and review commitments. What would be the process of reviewing and collectively taking stock of these commitments, and to what extent would they promote incremental improvement rather than regression?
- Create a multi-stakeholder dynamic. Where is today the dynamic of civil society engagement (businesses, cities and regions, NGOs) likely to amplify and relay national policies, knowing that the "biodiversity action agenda" is not yet formally discussed?
A key governance issue, a tight schedule
- a first, which will start in 2019, will involve a number of consultations (regional, thematic, international, etc.) to work on a first draft of the post-2020 framework. This phase is expected to last until late summer 2019;
- then, a consensus-building phase will run until late spring 2020, when a first version of the "final" draft of the post-2020 framework will be put up for negotiation at an intermediate meeting [2] of the CBD;
- the third phase, up to the end of 2020 and COP15 in Beijing, will be a phase of high-level mobilisation and, it is to be hoped, of fine-tuning the last outstanding points before the Parties meet in Beijing.