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State of Global Environmental Governance 2022

Never in the history of humanity has the world faced so many environmental threats. Climate change is now called a climate emergency. We are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. Our oceans are being choked with plastic, and we continue to produce toxic chemicals that are harmful to humans and wildlife. For millions of people, access to fresh water and sanitation is a growing challenge...Now more than ever, the international community must step up and ensure that the global environment is properly protected.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework: Business as usual or a turning point?

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF)1 was adopted during the 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at 3:30 a.m. on the morning of December 19, 2022, against a backdrop of protests by African countries. This mirrored the fractious context of conservation over the last century and recent decades, and the 3.5 years of negotiation of the GBF leading up to COP15.

Promoting Synergies Between Climate Change Adaptation and Biodiversity

This technical brief is a joint collaboration with the Nairobi work programme expert group on biodiversity and climate change adaptation and has been published as a supplement to the NAP technical guidelines. It targets country-level Convention on Biological Diversity and United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change focal points and technical staff of ministries who are engaged in the planning and implementation of NAPs and NBSAPs.

Full Document (Pdf)

Saving the ocean and climate through innovative marine protected area finance mechanisms

Ocean threats: acidification, deoxygenation, warming, heatwaves. Do we have anything useful to bend, change, or reverse the results? This brochure, conceived to advocate and educate at the UNFCCC COP27 meetings, summarises these threats and how various solutions (explained within) can actually help protect the ocean as Nature-based Solutions, if correctly constructed, and the existing and emerging financial mechanisms and institutions that can build and fortify these solutions. 

WWF Living Planet Report 2022 - Building a Nature-Positive Society

This edition of the Living Planet Report confirms the planet is in the midst of a biodiversity and climate crisis, and that we have a last chance to act. This goes beyond conservation. A nature-positive future needs transformative - game changing - shifts in how we produce, how we consume, how we govern, and what we finance. We hope it inspires you to be part of that change.

Full Report (Pdf)

Mainstreaming Biodiversity in Forestry

Forests are host to most of Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity. The conservation of the world’s biodiversity is thus utterly dependent on the way in which we interact with and use the world’s forests. The role of forests in maintaining biodiversity is also explicitly recognized by the United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests 2017– 2030 and in the ongoing discussions around the forthcoming post-2020 global biodiversity framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

The CBD Post-2020 biodiversity framework: People's place within the rest of nature

Recognizing two decades of failure to achieve global goals and targets, parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are in the final phase of negotiating a Post-   2020 Global Biodiversity Framework for the conservation, sustainable use and benefit sharing of biodiversity. The framework attempts to set out path-ways, goals and targets for the next decade to achieve positive biodiversity change. This perspective intends to help that framework set people firmly as part of nature, not apart from it.

The State of the World's Mangroves 2022

Healthy mangrove ecosystems are critical for global climate action – playing a key role in carbon storage and in building resilience to a rapidly warming world. Mangroves stabilize coastlines, reduce erosion, foster biodiversity growth and protect coastal communities by building their adaptive capacity and making them more resilient to the impacts of climate change, such as sea-level rise, storms and coastal erosion, Mangroves prevent more than US$65 billion in property damages and reduce flood risk to some 15 million people every year.