National commitments to Aichi Targets and their implications for monitoring the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework

Acknowledgements: This study was funded by the KR/Hempel Foundations (Denmark). The funders played no role in the study design, data collection, analysis and interpretation of data, or the writing of this manuscript.Funder: KR FoundationFunder: Hempel Fonden; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100017422AbstractThe Convention on Biological Biodiversity (CBD) exists as a major multilateral environmental agreement to safeguard biodiversity and “live in harmony with nature”. To deliver it, strategies and frameworks are set out in regular agreements that are then implemented at the national scale. However, we are not on track to achieve overall goals, and frameworks so far have not been successful. This could be due to unambitious targets, low follow-through on commitments, or desired outcomes for nature not being achieved when action is taken. Here, we focus on national planning and reporting documents from a set of 30% of Parties to the CBD. We found that nearly half of the commitments mentioned in national planning documents did not appear in the Sixth National Reports and that further losses emerged due to measures reported as incomplete or ineffective. There were differences between commitments to each of the Aichi Targets, with more losses in high-profile and “institutionally challenging” Targets. Commitments from Parties in different Human Development Index categories had different outcomes among Targets, and Parties self-identifying as “megadiverse countries” had overall higher rates of reported success. Our results are important for informing the monitoring of commitment implementation in the Kunming-Montreal “global biodiversity package”.</jats:p

RS-enabled EBV Road Map

The ESA funded GlobDiversity project was the first large-scale project explicitly designed to develop and engineer Remote Sensing enabled Essential Biodiversity Variables (RS-enabled EBVs) and ended in June 2020. The project also aimed to contribute with the documents and procedures generated to the development of a workflow starting from user requirements to final products that can be used for policy relevant global biodiversity monitoring and assessments. As a final step, the project developed a road map discussing the project’s outputs, e.g., strategic documents, processing chain and data products derived when focusing on particular RS-enabled EBVs, in the context of the overall EBV framework with and in context of relevant players such as the Group on Earth Observations Biodiversity Observation Network (GEO BON), CBD, IPBES, CEOS, the EBV user community and decision makers, Copernicus Services and the space agencies. We will thus present this RS-enabled EBV road map strategic document with the aim to put in place the project’s output into the EBV frame work. The proposed workflow includes discussions about the involvement of different users from the very beginning, to the development of any EBV data set, as well as to the implementation and use in the framework of the indictors. In addition, we will discuss the project’s experiences gained while developing biodiversity products based on remote sensing. In particular, we will present knowledge gaps and recommendations when evaluating the proposed road map. Thus, we will present this strategic document, so that the biodiversity community can most benefit from GlobDiversity’s outcome