10 October 2024 - Yesterday (9 October 2024), experts joined University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) interim CEO, Lindsay Hooper, to address pivotal systemic outcomes needed from and after the UNCBD COP16 in Cali, Colombia, later this month.
The panellists joining Hooper were Professor Melissa Leach, the newly appointed Executive Director of the Cambridge Conservation Initiative (CCI); Matt Jones, Chief Impact Officer at the United Nations Environment Programme – World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC); Victoria Leggett, Head of Impact Development at Union Bancaire Privee (UBP) who runs the bank’s Biodiversity Restoration Strategy and is Co-Chair of CISL-convened Investment Leaders Group (ILG), and Fiona Dobson, Senior International Policy Officer at the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB).
Across the hour, conversation ranged across the breadth of action, strategies and new thinking needed if we are to achieve a step-change approach to addressing the nature crisis. This included the need to reshape our economic structures and markets to address the fundamental challenge that it is currently more profitable to undermine nature than to protect it. It covered approaches to gathering and sharing data; connecting, learning from and scaling on-the-ground solutions and innovations that work; governance and processes to address critical questions of justice and participation in decision-making; the importance of investing time in substantive, cross-sector dialogue to work through difficult discussions.
Leggett’s financial lens gave the soundbite of the afternoon: “For real change at scale to happen, we need a ‘momentum sandwich’.”
“We need the bread: the top-down regulation to be supportive, and I think we're seeing that. We also need - and this is often forgotten certainly in the business world - a bottom-up consumer-citizen demand for change. And then, sitting in the middle, and what we're talking about a lot today, is innovation. Innovation from the finance world, in terms of products, services, and acknowledgement of the role of nature and the change in the way that we do business. And also, critically, innovation from the corporate sector.”
Jones spoke of the COP’s three objectives: conserving biodiversity; sustainable use, and also the fair and equitable sharing of benefits and the need to respect all three to be successful. He also raised the change in engagement from the private and financial sectors over recent COPs: “If you go through decisions from early COPs, you’ll find some stuff about business being bad. A few COPs later, you’ll find , ‘oh, maybe they can pay for things’. But it wasn’t until COP10 [in Japan in 2010] that businesses as an agent for change started to be recognised. And it’s fundamentally changed since then.”
“At COP14 in Egypt, I met most of the business people there, about 60. It didn’t take long. And I met the single representative of a private financial institution. Then COP15 [in Montreal, Canada, in 2022], it was fundamentally different with at least 1,000 people interested in business and finance – and a real change in momentum through the engagement by the private and financial sectors. Cali is going to be even bigger.”
Dobson also spoke of the key policy-related expectations of this year’s COP16, saying “This needs to be a COP of national implementation. At the last COP, governments came up with this new global plan for nature – and it had some fantastic, really high-level and ambitions commitments. And now we need to make sure we’re not just celebrating some nice words on paper, but putting that into genuine action.”
“The deadline for putting forward national targets and plans was, in fact, COP16. So very soon. Only a third of countries have put forward their national targets. And far fewer have put forward the full details of their national plans, known as NDSAPs (National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans). Therefore, we know we’re a long way off. So, at this COP, we’re going to have to have very frank discussions as to why that is.”
Professor Leach’s closing remarks looked at the idea of how to communicate this crisis better through better shared language, positivity and hope; creating a combined and understood language, and the need to reach as many people as possible. “We need stories of hope out there, grounded in examples, and we need them to be shared far and wide: to decision-makers, to negotiators, to businesses, and to civil society.”
“And we need dialogue. There are so many different constituencies involved: there are people in their everyday lives who care about nature; scientists who know a lot about the details; and we have a business community that has its own areas of thinking and action. And they all speak different languages. I’m really struck by the gulf that exists between these areas and more not understanding each other.
“So, there’s a real need for us to be humble and say when we don’t understand things; call out when people are using language that exists in a silo, and build a dialogue that can bridge these different worlds together and enable us to move forward collectively."
Listen to a recording of the discussion, which starts during Fiona's discussion of COP16:
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