Year 2024’s theme, “Be Part of the Plan,” is a call on all stakeholders — governments, civil societies, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), businesses, corporate houses, lawmakers, and individuals — to take part in whatever capacity they can towards actions looking at the restoration of vital ecosystems (forests, wetlands, oceans, mangroves, grasslands, savannahs) to regain biodiversity values and promote progress in life side by side with nature
By Salam Rajesh
On Wednesday, the 22nd of May, 2024, the world community will become one in a collective observation of an important international day that marks the crucial efforts of world communities towards restoring the planet’s diverse biological diversity to their near natural status as best as is possible in the larger campaign to halt the extinction of species and the decline of life itself.
In December of 2022, the world community came together in Montreal and Kunming under the lead of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and agreed upon a global plan to transform the Homo sapiens’ relationship with nature, and this agreement translated into ‘The Biodiversity Plan: For Life on Earth’.
The adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework sets clear goals and concrete measures to stop and reverse the loss of biological diversity within the deadline year of 2050. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) was adopted by the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity in December 2022 at Montreal in Canada.
Year 2024’s theme, “Be Part of the Plan,” is a call on all stakeholders — governments, civil societies, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), businesses, corporate houses, lawmakers, and individuals — to take part in whatever capacity they can towards actions looking at the restoration of vital ecosystems (forests, wetlands, oceans, mangroves, grasslands, savannahs) to regain biodiversity values and promote progress in life side by side with nature.
The underlining motive of the call urges everybody – boys, girls, women, men, the veterans, everyone irrespective of age, creed, gender or religion – to dedicate their energy, time, and interest for realizing the objective of people’s participation in regenerating nature to its near natural condition, as best as is possible at all levels – local, national, regional, and global.
The secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), an extended organ of the United Nations, is the main international instrument which is pushing the global campaign forward, as much as all related organs of the UN – the FAO, UNEP, UNDP, IUCN are all lending support to this universal call of saving planet Earth’s biodiversity.
The key elements in the KM-GBF are four goals set for the target year 2050, and 23 targets for the year 2030. Quite importantly, the Target-2 of the KM-GBF stresses that by year 2030 at least 30 percent of areas of degraded terrestrial, inland water, and coastal and marine ecosystems are under effective restoration ‘in order to enhance biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services, ecological integrity and connectivity’.
The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) categorically stated that the main direct drivers of degradation in terrestrial, inland water, and coastal ecosystems are the expansion of crop and grazing lands into natural areas, unsustainable agricultural and forestry practices, overharvesting and, in specific areas, urban expansion, infrastructure development and extractive industries (IPBES, 2018).
The issue is compounded when viewed from the perspective of ecosystem degradation due to chemical contamination, reductions in water quantity and/or quality, and warming temperature that is also influencing degradation in inland water and coastal ecosystems.
Taking the example of Loktak Lake and other wetlands within the Manipur River Basin, residual run-offs from the peripheral agricultural lands and the direct in-flow of feeder streams and rivers carrying substantial load of pollutants are influencing steady decline in water quality and the degradation of the water bodies, while paving path for invasive plant species to make inroads and flourish due to the nutrient enrichment and rapid siltation.
Four years back in 2019, the United Nations had proclaimed the current decade between years 2021 and 2030 as the ‘United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration (UN Decade)’ with the primary objective to prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems across the globe. The thrust underlined in this UN Decade importantly envisioned “a restored relationship between humans and nature” emphasizing the need for transformative change.
The question on how far this aspired relationship has been achieved with just six years more to go before the campaign comes to an end, is the perplexed issue placed on the table. For one thing, it is being reported that many countries are failing in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and neither progressing much on the agenda. For India, too, it is being asked how far the National Biodiversity Strategy Action Plans (NBSAPs) are actually bearing fruit.
The NBSAPs are formally adopted as policy or within the legal and administrative framework of countries, and thereto integrated with the ‘national sustainable development plans, poverty reduction strategies, and other relevant national sectoral and cross-sectoral plans, in line with national circumstances and priorities’. Yet, in these past years questions had been raised on how the Plans have been put into action and filtered down to the States, and further on to the grassroots.
The drive on the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration is primarily seen as complementary to the achievement of the UN’s seventeen Sustainable Development Goals that are considered vital to ecosystem restoration to achieve multiple ecosystem benefits – food and water security, sustainable livelihoods, climate regulation, shared values, rejuvenation of biological diversity, and much more.
On the concern of how much of progress and achievement has been made on ground in actuality, the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN spells out the message clearly for the member countries, wherein, “Focusing on the contributions of biodiversity and ecosystem services, countries must define clear, measurable actions, gather resources, forge partnerships, and build capacity for achieving concrete outcomes of restoration activities” (FAO, 2023).
This inherently is an indicator that many countries are running short of their national goals in tune with the targets set by the UN organs, much of which has been painfully demonstrated in the failures of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and other international agreements, including the crucial debates on how far the Paris Climate Agreements had achieved its set goals.
The Aichi Targets fundamentally did not mention the explicit relationship between restoration and biodiversity, ecosystem integrity and connectivity. The long-term nature of restoration was not acknowledged as the target language implied that ecosystems could be restored within the decadal process (FAO, 2024).
So, as the push and pulls shift from one plate to the other at the international platforms, it comes down to the level of State policy planning on how far are States (as in India) willing to commit fully to ecosystem restoration to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. This understandably is crucial to bringing back nature to its near-natural status to achieve many goals including limiting global temperature rise, local climate regulation, biodiversity recovery, sustainable livelihoods, and importantly, water and food security.