Knowledge for ambitious, integrated, value-explicit and just collective actions towards the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework

Ambitious global goals and targets to address ongoing declines in biodiversity and nature’s contribution to people (NCP) have been adopted in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). For a successful GBF, Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) face the challenge of ensuring that collective actions are sufficiently ambitious, integrated across actions and sustainability dimensions, and that they consider plural values of nature and diverse perceptions of justice. Without successfully addressing this challenge, national actions for the GBF risk 1) falling short of adding up to global-level ambitions; 2) generating unnecessary trade-offs between sustainability outcome goals and between action targets through lack of policy coherence, and 3) stalling over conflicting views about what is fair and sustainable. 

Here, we propose a range of complementary research activities, centred on further developing model and scenario applications, through which sustainability research can help address these challenges to better support progress towards the GBF. The key research activities we discuss are a) designing plural integrated, value- and justice-explicit scenario narratives of nature- and people-positive futures, b) downscaling global biodiversity targets to country level following different distributive justice and nature value perspectives, c) evaluating planned and implemented country actions towards the GBF, and d) modelling scenarios of both nature- and people-positive narratives, and planned and implemented country actions. We present example applications of these components, including a set of nature- and people-positive scenario narratives that explore different value perspectives on nature and plural perceptions of justice, as well as downscaling selected GBF targets. We highlight how analytical outputs from the suggested research activities may enrich crucial national and global processes (including the global analysis and review of collective progress towards the GBF and revisions and the implementation of National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans and national targets) to ensure a successful GBF, through sufficiently ambitious, integrated, value- and justice-explicit collective actions.