Can the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund make a difference?

The world has been scrambling for money to conserve biodiversity since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Almost 30 years later, on August 27, 2023, countries established the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) with a promise to resolve this long-standing money crunch. The fund was established at the 7th Assembly of the Global Environment Facility (an agency set up in 1991 for protecting the environment) in Vancouver, Canada. It will help countries achieve the 23 targets set under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF). The framework was adopted at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity last December.

The task, however, is daunting. The world requires at least US $200 billion a year until 2030 to fund biodiversity protection programmes, as assessed during COP15. GBFF, which will be managed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), will raise funds through private, philanthropic and government investments. This is a departure from GEF, which relied on just 40 donors for finance. It will also have access to funds earmarked for biodiversity conservation under GEF. The facility has a cumulative budget of $5.25 billion for 2022-26, of which 36 per cent is earmarked for biodiversity. The remaining budget is for projects on climate change, pollution, land and ocean health.

“There is a financing gap for nature, and it needs to be filled not just by more funds but also by spending those funds in a way that multiplies and enhances the impact,” Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, chairperson of GEF tells Down To Earth (DTE). “We aim to do this with resources available for biodiversity conservation and for other thematic areas that have synergies with it,” he added. GBFF could also get money from the proposed multilateral fund generated from fees for the commercial use of digital genetic sequence information, crucial for the development of products such as vaccines and hardy crop varieties. Decided at COP15, the details of the fund will be drawn over the next two years. The fee can generate upwards of $15 billion a year, estimates Covington & Burling LLP, an advisory organisation.

While it is too early to predict if GBFF would make a difference, the financial gap remains huge. In 2019, spending on biodiversity conservation was estimated to be between $124 and $143 billion per year against a total estimated need of $722 to $967 billion per year. If GBFF fails to find adequate money, countries will have to find more funds domestically, which has not been successful in the past, particularly for developing countries. Currently, the world is on track to see a financing gap of $4.1-trillion for biodiversity by 2050, according to the “State of Finance for Nature”, released by the UN Environment Programme in May 2021. Recognising the importance of domestic funding, target 19 of KMGBF suggests a host of nature- based solutions such as payment for ecosystem services, green bonds and benefit-sharing mechanisms.

These solutions are problematic and in their infancy. They push countries towards “blended finance”, where public resources are used to “catalyse” private investment. Though a new concept for biodiversity, there is evidence that blended financing for climate change has not yielded the desired results. The World Bank, for instance, has been able to leverage just $0.25 of private climate finance for every dollar of public money used, suggests a brief by Third World Network, a non-profit based in Malaysia. Also, these methods take time to implement and the seven years available might not be enough, the brief points out.

Among the innovative methods proposed under target 19, biodiversity credits, or biocredits, have gained popularity in recent years. While similar to carbon credits used to control greenhouse gas emissions, they are not as contentious as they are not designed to offset negative impacts on biodiversity. These biocredits have the potential to generate funds. Simon Morgan, chief biodiv-ersity officer and co-founder, of ValueNature, a startup that has developed biocredits, believes that these could generate the required funds needed to meet KMGBF targets. However, biocredits are at a nascent stage and their implementation—regulation, certification schemes, policy and regulatory systems—is still being discussed. How they can be linked with credits to other financing instruments and initia-tives must also be determined. The UK and French governments are leading the way in creating this roadmap for a high-integrity bio-diversity credits market.

Countries can cumulatively save an additional $1.25 trillion directly and $7 trillion indirectly if they remove the existing subsidies for economic activities that harm biodiversity. For instance, govern-ments world over provide $700 billion in subsidies for farming, which is responsible for 14 per cent of global deforestation. This point is also mentioned in target 18 of KMGBF that calls to eliminate, phase out or reform incentives including subsi-dies that are harmful for biodiversity, in a proportionate, just, fair, effective and equitable way, while substantially and progressively reducing them by at least $500 billion per year by 2030.

Such scrimping of funds for biodiversity does not bode well for the future. Having abundant money at hand could prevent a fate similar to that of the Aichi Biodiversity targets that the world failed to meet in 2020 due to a lack of adequate funds. It was to avoid this that negotiators at COP15 included finances in the framework’s targets. While the world is struggling to generate $200 billion for biodiversity protection, more than 50 per cent of the global gross domestic product, or around $44 trillion, is highly or moderately dependent on nature and its services. This means that the world needs to invest in biodiversity in order to protect the economy. This is a vicious cycle.

The first GBFF council meeting will be held in January next year, to approve the work plan for the June 2024 council meeting. The first projects under the new fund are likely to be launched ahead of COP16 slated towards the end of 2024. The fund has managed to find $200 million it needed as seed capital to become operational. The challenge now lies in populating the conservation funds.

Shrinking budget

At COP15 last year, Union Minister of Environment, Forest and Climate Change Bhupender Yadav, while supporting GBFF, indicated that public finance is needed to meet KMGBF targets and goals. The country, however, has reduced the budget for its four centrally sponsored schemes for environmental protection between 2018 and 2024, as per Envistat 2023. The schemes are the National Mission for a Green India, the Integrated Development of Wildlife Habitats, Conservation of Natural Resources and Ecosystems and the National River Conservation Programme. In 2019-20, the four schemes had a cumulative budget of Rs 1,385.74 crore. In the 2022-23 revised budget, it was reduced by 38 per cent to Rs 857.13 crore. The schemes received budgetary allocation of Rs 1,064.3 crore in 2023-24.

This is nowhere near the demand in the country. India has so far carried out three country-level biodiversity assessments. In October 2018, the country released the “Biodiversity Expenditure Review” (BER) report followed by “Financial Needs Assessment” (FNA) report in November 2018 and finally the Biodiversity Finance Plan (BFP) in May 2019. According to BER, the annual projected average public finance for 2017-18 to 2021-22 will be around nearly $10 billion. The FNA report suggests that around $16.5 billion would be needed for the period.

BFP prepared using these assessments identified 12 potential solutions to bridge the financial gap. Of them, five solutions—mainstreaming biodiversity in public schemes, corporate social responsibility, augmenting public finance, ecological fiscal transfer and access and benefit sharing—were quantified. The projected annual contribution from these five financial solutions is nearly $2.2 billion, still leaving an annual gap in resources of nearly $3.7 billion.

India does not even have recent estimates for funds needed for biodiversity conservation, says Nandan Nawn of Biodiversity Collaborative, a non-profit based in Bengaluru. Nawn, who also teaches at the Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi, says his team is currently trying to find the estimate by analysing various government documents.

The question of 30X30

Beyond funds, the world is also struggling to find enough space to conserve its terrestrial and marine biodiversity. The world has already failed to meet the Aichi Biodiversity target of protecting 20 per cent of the earth by 2020. Under target 3 of KMGBF, countries now have to protect at least 30 per cent of their “terrestrial and inland water areas, and of marine and coastal areas” by 2030. This is popularly called the 30x30 target.

While on the face of it, the KMGBF target looks more ambitious than before, experts say it is in fact watered down. The targets, for the first time, include biodiversity-rich areas under indigenous people and local communities in the 30 per cent calculation. Additionally, it considers “other effective area- based conservation measures” or OECMs, which were first defined in 2018 as areas other than protected areas that help in-situ conservation of biodiversity.

These can also include private lands. Currently, the world has 16.05 per cent of its land and inland waters and 8.17 per cent of its oceans under protected areas, suggests the UN Protected Planet database, accessed on October 6, 2023. When existing OECMs are considered, the share of protected area increases to 17.23 per cent of land and inland water and 8.28 of marine areas.

Indigenous people and local communities manage over 32 per cent of global land in 87 countries. So the conservation target should have been much higher under KMGBF, says Oscar Soria, campaign director of US-based non-profit Avaaz. In 2016, US biologist E O Wilson had said that half of the Earth must be protected. This target was acceptable to over two-thirds of conservation scientists, suggests a survey in 2019; but it was not even considered at COP15, says Soria.

Both KMGBF and GEF, at the July meeting, recognised the important role the indigenous communities play in conservation. While KMGBF explicitly mentions in seven of the 23 targets that the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities should be respected during the efforts towards meeting the targets, the GEF Assembly has decided to earmark as much as 20 per cent of the donor funds for the indigenous communities. Direct access to funds is an additional support layer for indigenous communities who are responsible for 80 per cent of the planet’s biodiversity, says Giovanni B Reyes, president of the Phillipines chapter of ICCA Consortium, a global organisation of indigenous peoples and local communities.

The allocation of 20 per cent of the funds to indigenous communities could be an interesting opportunity but there is also a danger that it will simply be captured by groups that are proxies or agents for the large conservation corporations, says Simon Counsell, consultant with UK-based non-profit Survival International.

There are several examples which suggest that governments tend to put human rights, particularly those of indigenous communities, aside when it comes to conservation projects, or protected areas, even post-KMGBF. For example, Survival International pointed out in a press release on September 6 that Tanzanian authorities prevented a delegation of Members of the European Parliament from visiting the country to investigate human rights abuses against the Maasai in the name of conservation. The Maasai have lived for generations in Tanzania’s Serengeti ecosystem, but they have been systematically marginalised and violently evicted from their ancestral lands to make way for conservation projects, tourism, and trophy-hunting schemes. To avoid such instances, there has to be a significant investment in capacity building of indigenous communities. “To ensure success as we make this shift, governments, corporations, and non-profits should look to early leaders when determining best practices and lessons-learned,” says Kristen Walker Painemilla, senior vice president of the US-based non-profit Conservation International.

Target 3 is also set to be a big money guzzler. At a meeting in the run-up to COP15, it was estimated that the world would need $103-178 billion annually to increase the coverage of protected areas from current levels to 30 per cent by 2030. This would be an increase of 4.7-7.3 times from the current estimates of expenditures. This is likely to use up a major chunk of the $200 billion, leaving little for the other important KMGBF targets such as the restoration of degraded land (target 2) and reducing levels of pollution to a level which is not harmful to biodiversity (target 7). The inclusion of indigenous communities-owned land and OECMs could reduce the expenditure on target 3, but by how much remains unknown.

The bid to increase protected areas could have been found to be counterproductive, considering that existing areas have not been effective in safeguarding biodiversity. Using satellite images, researchers from China in January 2023 highlighted that globally anthropogenic degradation continues in protected forests that are believed to be intact. Similarly, when European researchers investigated the impact of industrial trawl fishing and sensitive indicator species in and around 727 marine protected areas, they found that 59 per cent of them are commercially trawled, and average trawling intensity across the protected areas is at least 1.4-fold higher as compared with non-protected areas. The abundance of sensitive species such as sharks and rays decreased by 69 per cent in heavily trawled areas, the researchers found.

Little is known about the biodiversity values within protected areas and the extent to which they are effective in maintaining those values, points out Heather Bingham, senior programme officer on the UN Protected Planet database. While many protected area managers carry out management effectiveness assessments and monitor biodiversity trends, little of the resulting data is made available to inform global monitoring. “We are working to build a system that will support governments in reporting more meaningful data on the results of these assessments. This will also include reporting on biodiversity outcomes and whether protected areas are being governed in ways that are equitable for local people,” says Bingham.

There is also debate on whether the decision to include OECMs in protected areas will help. “There are no assessment tools available to evaluate their functioning and the world has hardly any examples to understand their effectiveness. In the best-case scenario, OECMs are going to be part of the solution, but will not be a panacea,” says Stuart Butchart, chief scientist of global non-profit BirdLife International. There is a risk that governments recognise suites of sites as OECMs without properly determining that they really are effective, which is the “E” in OECM, Butchart adds.

In December 2022, when COP15 took place, India already had 998 protected areas, amounting to around 5.28 per cent of the country’s area. The Union environment minister told the media that the country already has 27 per cent of its area under conservation, including reserve forests, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, mangroves, Ramsar sites and eco-sensitive zones. The country will depend on OECMs to achieve the remaining 3 percentage points to achieve the target of 30x30.

While the country might easily meet the numbers, several of its protected areas are in a poor state. An assessment of the management effectiveness of 146 national parks and wildlife sanctuaries in 2018-19 using IUCN’s Management Effect-iveness Evaluation Tool revealed an overall mean score of 62.01 per cent, with a score range of 26.66 to 84.17 per cent. Wide variations are visible even in tiger reserves, which are the most protected areas in the country. Of the 53 tiger reserves in the country, 51 were evaluated in 2022. The results indicate an overall mean score of 78.01 per cent with a score range of 50 to 94 per cent. Indigenous communities are also struggling in the country. According to the “State of Land Conflicts 2022” report by Delhi-based non-profit Land Conflict Watch, out of the 607 conflicts identified by them, 86 were linked to conservation and forestry and 32 occurred in protected areas.

“Under the new (KMGBF) framework, we are talking about an equitable system and about supporting communities that conserve. However, India has no mechanism to support community-led conservation,” says Neema Pathak Broome, coordinator of the Conservation and Livelihoods programme of Pune-based non-profit Kalpavriksh Environmental Group. There are many areas in India where communities are conserving without any support from the Centre. The policy should be to strengthen local institutions and help them conserve, she says.

“There should be strict norms to ensure that biodiversity-rich areas are not diverted for other purposes, such as plantations, which cannot replace old-growth forests. The current government policies, for example, the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Act, 2023, are sadly going in the opposite direction,” says Broome.

Challenges galore

The world is likely to struggle to achieve other KMGBF targets, such as target 6 on invasive alien species. Recognising invasive alien species as a key driver of biodiversity loss, the target says the world must “prevent” and “reduce” the rate of introduction and establishment of invasive alien species by at least 50 per cent by 2030.

While the world might not meet the target (on invasive alien species), members would be able to place measures and approaches such as integrated governance of such species, which can bring about significant progress, says Melodie A McGeoch, professor at the School of Life Sciences at LaTrobe University in Australia and coordinating lead author of the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Assessment on Invasive Alien Species and their Control in response to a question by DTE.

The world might also face similar challenges in target 8 on minimising the impact of climate change and ocean acidification on biodiversity and increasing its resilience through mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction actions.

The efficacy of the changes made under KMGBF will become clearer at COP 16 to be held in October next year, where members have to submit their revised National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans. While Spain and Japan have already released their updated action plans, most countries have begun the process. There is, though, no doubt that seven years is a short time.

This was first published in the 16-31 October, 2023 print edition of Down To Earth Magazine

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