The UN’s new Biodiversity Framework needs serious feminist scrutiny
By Mwanahamisi Singano
For the next two weeks, government signatories to the UN Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) are meeting in Montreal, Canada to agree on a new set of targets to address biodiversity loss and disappearing ecosystems.
Every 10 years, the CBD negotiates what it calls a “Global Biodiversity Framework,” or GBF. This year’s meeting — the CBD’s 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) — is significant in that governments are gathering to finalize a new Framework that will guide action over the next eight years.
While COP15 might not be making as much news or attracting as many heads of states and governments as the recently concluded UNFCCC climate negotiations, more than 18,000 delegates from 193 countries are gathered here in Montreal to negotiate and adopt the new GBF, which includes 22 proposed targets (see below).
The new framework is being negotiated amid a triple planetary crisis of biological diversity loss, climate change, and rampant pollution–as well as escalated overconsumption, racism, and structural gender inequalities. Yet, the four-year process to develop a draft Framework has resulted in a heavily bracketed text, a testimony of the mammoth disagreement among Parties and an outsized influence of the cooperates and businesses.
These proposed targets need serious feminist scrutiny.
Firstly, reading through the proposed 22 targets surfaces countless mentions of “nature-based” or “nature-positive” solutions. These controversial phrases are so loosely defined that companies and governments have twisted them to include failed interventions, such as carbon offset schemes, at the expense of real ecosystem restoration. Governments, likely under the influence of corporations, have also added Target 15: ‘the impact of biodiversity loss on businesses’ — while failing to acknowledge how unsustainable business practices are contributing to extinction, climate emergencies, and the destruction of livelihoods and cultures.
Despite the call of the current UN Secretary-General to reform the UN system, we continue to witness an unprecedented state of corporate capture. The just-concluded UNFCCC COP27, for example, was a playground for business interests. Fossil fuel lobbyists were accredited in record numbers; private sector representatives gained greater access to negotiating rooms; and some companies shamelessly placed their logos as COP27 sponsors. Increasingly, polluters and those extracting from the planet and the people are viewed as heroes for making ‘big announcements’ in multilateral spaces — creating an illusion of ‘innovative finance’ that obscures the real need for government investments.
The targets being negotiated should also embrace the scientific and historical evidence that women and girls, despite structural inequalities, are leading the protection of our planet and people. While women are well-known to be playing key roles as custodians of the world’s land and resources, they have been consistently denied their rights to exercise their agency, secure their land and resource rights, and lead and shape the local and global responses to global crises.
This recognition of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and women as protectors of nature should go hand in hand with making resources available to them in the form of grants and not loans, and at a scale that matches the crises the world is facing. Loans and ‘innovative finance’ should not be dangling carrots in the suite of financial tools to address this triple planetary crisis.
From UNFCCC processes to the CBD negotiations, the call to disinvest in fossil fuel or end subsidies that incentivize biodiversity loss has never been louder. Developed countries have an obligation to deliver their financial commitment and redirect the current fossil fuel or harmful subsidies to communities leading the noble work of saving the planet and the people.
Finally, feminists are calling for systems change — replacing the current capitalist, patriarchal and racist systems with feminist ones that center people and the planet. This includes the need to address overconsumption with strategies for de-growth, without which the targets on sustainable consumption will be impossible to achieve.
Currently, we run the risk of ending up with a new global framework that centers private interests at the expense of the wellbeing of communities and nature. Grounding the framework in a feminist agenda for people and the planet could help change this picture, contribute to decolonizing conservation, and curb corporate influence.
Mwanahamisi (“Mishy”) Singano is an African feminist passionate about fighting structural and intersecting inequalities while contributing to a more just, equal, fairer, and sustainable world. At WEDO she serves as Senior Global Policy Lead.
