Unpacking the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Agreement: Identifying key advances and making them work

Many targets mention rights specifically

The targets are where human rights, and more specifically the collective rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, get more specific mention and where some of the most critical advances for human rights can be seen. Incorporating references to rights throughout the targets recognises the interdependence between biodiversity and human rights, seeing promoting human rights as a tool for environmental action. The hard work of many indigenous and community leaders over the years of negotiation can be seen in the focus and attention paid in the final text to these rights.

Targets that explicitly mention human rights include the following:

• Target 1: on spatial planning and effective management while “respecting the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities”
• Target 3: on conservation while “recognizing and respecting the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, including over their traditional territories” and ensuring that all systems of protected and conserved areas are “equitably governed”
• Target 5: on use, harvesting and trade of wild species and preventing over exploitation while “respecting and protecting customary sustainable use by indigenous peoples and local communities”
• Target 9: on sustainable use and management of wild species while “protecting and encouraging customary sustainable use by indigenous peoples and local communities”
• Target 21: on the use of the best available knowledge, recognising that “traditional knowledge, innovations, practices and technologies of indigenous peoples and local communities should only be accessed with their free, prior and informed consent”
• Target 22: on ensuring representation and participation in decision-making; access to justice and information; respecting rights over culture and over lands, territories and resources of indigenous peoples and local communities; respecting the same rights of women and girls, children, youth and people with disabilities, and ensuring the full protection of environmental human rights defenders
• Target 23: on ensuring gender equality

Gaps in the framework

Despite these important and ground-breaking advances in human rights language in an environmental agreement, and the underlying acceptance of the links between human rights and biodiversity, significant gaps in the framework remain. One area of concern is the insufficient attention paid to addressing the direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss, including but not limited to the approach taken in relation to the regulation of business impacts on biodiversity.

Target 15, the target dealing with the impacts and dependencies of businesses and financial institutions on biodiversity, fails to require regulation of business and only encourages voluntary risk assessment and disclosure.

Targets 18 and 19 deal with financing, with Target 18 committing to the identification and elimination or reform of harmful subsidies and the scaling up of positive incentives for conservation and sustainable use. This short Target is hugely important, and a real change in the funds flowing into industries that destroy biodiversity, directing them towards activities that contribute to conservation and sustainable use, would have a significant impact. Target 19 calls for many different types of funding to be brought forwards, including “stimulating innovative schemes such as … biodiversity offsets and credits …” (among others)[4]. However, there is only a shallow understanding among many about how biodiversity offsets and credits would work in practice, and there are concerns about governments depending too much on private financing that may not provide the rigour needed to ensure rates of biodiversity loss are reduced and reversed at the speed we need.

Impact reliant on implementation

Overall, the Kunming-Montreal agreement is an international multilateral agreement and as such its impact will depend on how it is implemented. The vast weight of responsibility for implementation lies at the national and local levels, where adequate and appropriate resourcing needs to be found and provided to the right actors. Inadequate and damaging policies and laws need to be identified and reformed, and the enabling and enriching power of local actions and the leadership of indigenous peoples and local communities need to be championed and supported. There are opportunities in this new agreement to support transformative action towards change, but the hard work lies ahead.

[1] “The implementation of the framework should follow a human rights-based approach respecting, protecting, promoting, and fulfilling human rights. The framework acknowledges the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.”

[2] “The implementation of the framework should be guided by the principle of intergenerational equity which aims to meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and to ensure meaningful participation of younger generations in decision making processes at all levels.”

[3] “The framework acknowledges the important roles and contributions of indigenous peoples and local communities as custodians of biodiversity and partners in the conservation, restoration and sustainable use. Its implementation must ensure their  rights, knowledge, including traditional knowledge associated with biodiversity, innovations, worldviews, values and practices of indigenous peoples and local communities are respected, documented, preserved  with their free, prior and informed consent, including through their full and effective participation in decision-making, in accordance with relevant national legislation, international instruments, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and human rights law. In this regard, nothing in this framework may be construed as diminishing or extinguishing the rights that indigenous peoples currently have or may acquire in the future.”

[4] Target 19, section (d) reads in full: “Stimulating innovative schemes such as payment for ecosystem services, green bonds, biodiversity offsets and credits, benefit-sharing mechanisms, with environmental and social safeguards”