Introduction
Globally, biodiversity is in crisis with one million species under threat of extinction and rapid declines in ecosystem functioning, overreaching planetary boundaries. International law initiatives to address this massive decline in biodiversity are led by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Between 21 October and 1 November 2024, the city of Cali in Colombia will host the sixteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 16). COP 16 comes at a crucial time to assess and turn the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) into a reality. The framework includes a number of ambitious goals, including a commitment to designate at least 30 per cent of global land and sea as protected areas (known as the “30 by 30” initiative).
COP 16 is centered around 3 main objectives: (1) translating the Biodiversity Plan into resolute national action, (2) mobilising and bolstering means of implementation, and (3) accelerating progress on access and benefit-sharing. Beneath these headlines, a key means to enhance actions towards the GBF is through promoting nature’s intrinsic values during implementation, as recognised by the CBD through two of the GBF targets (Target 19 and Target 14). As such, the GBF is joining the growing global movement that recognises nature’s intrinsic value by assigning “rights to nature”, notably under the leadership of many Indigenous people’s communities. This focus on nature’s intrinsic value supports many of the key objectives of the CBD as well as the respect and protection of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) traditional ecological knowledge and practices. The next COP on biodiversity offers an opportunity to affirm and protect the intrinsic value of nature and to challenge dominant market-based approaches to nature, which have failed repeatedly.
1. The CBD and how it values nature: From anthropocentrism to nature’s intrinsic value
Despite a brief nod to the intrinsic value of biodiversity in the preamble to the 1992 Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD), the dominant approach adopted by the CBD has been based upon an anthropocentric foundation of nature’s value to humans, including human wellbeing, but largely supporting capitalist economic systems. This is reflected not only in the text of the convention, global biodiversity targets, strategic plans and COP decisions but also in the soft law approach taken to address the conservation objective, as opposed to the hard law protocols developed for the second and third objectives of sustainable development and access and benefit sharing. A target-based mechanism continues to be adopted as opposed to a more progressive approach but has clearly not worked, and slow progress is being made towards the GBF action targets.
Perhaps the most important development in the GBF is that it now references ecocentric approaches for implementation. Action Target 19 focuses on the ambitious call for financial mobilisation of $200 Billion per Year for Biodiversity but also references the value of ecocentric collective actions. Target 19(f) states that “Enhancing the role of collective actions, including by indigenous peoples and local communities, Mother Earth centric actions and non-market- based approaches including community based natural resource management and civil society cooperation and solidarity aimed at the conservation of biodiversity.” Mother Earth-centric actions are defined in a footnote as: Ecocentric and rights-based approach enabling the implementation of actions towards harmonic and complementary relationships between peoples and nature, promoting the continuity of all living beings and their communities and ensuring the non-commodification of environmental functions of Mother Earth.
These targets provide a clear hook for countries to encourage the implementation of ecocentric approaches and to reduce the human-nature binary by enabling harmonic and complimentary relationships between them. Action Target 19 clearly recognises the indispensable role of IPLC and other groups who act for biodiversity, and Parties can implement co-beneficial actions for biodiversity and improve IPLC rights. Target 14 calls for the full integration of biodiversity and its multiple values into decision-making at all levels and across all sectors, in particular, thus promoting a voice for nature in all decision-making that impacts biodiversity. Elevating the voice of those with less power in decision making, such as IPLC, women, youth and others who represent nature, to enable their full and effective participation could mainstream intrinsic and relational values of nature into decision-making.
2. Indigenous peoples and local communities rights: Recognising relational approaches to nature
There is a significant overlap between the world’s areas of high biodiversity and Indigenous territories, and the role of IPLC has been recognised as a key factor in protecting the world’s biodiversity. On this front, the GBF goes further than any previous major international policy framework, highlighting the diversity of approaches to human-nature relationships, including many Indigenous worldviews, such as the references to Mother Earth associated with many indigenous cultures. The GBF also joins the international human rights jurisprudence recognising Indigenous peoples’ rights to maintain and protect their non-anthropocentric approaches and relationship with nature. Notably, the very rich jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights highlights the complementary between Indigenous peoples’ rights, biodiversity protection and the rights to a healthy environment.
Adopting a non-anthropocentric approach, in a 2017 advisory opinion, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights also highlighted that “the right to a healthy environment, unlike other rights, protects the components of the environment, such as forests, rivers and seas, as legal interests in themselves, even in the absence of the certainty or evidence of a risk to individuals.” This is a very significant development highlighting that human rights law supports a non-anthropocentric approach to law recognising the inherent rights of natural entities. This is also part of a wider body of international law supporting the view that environmental sustainability and respect for Indigenous peoples’ human rights are closely intertwined and complementary. From this perspective, the GBF is contributing to these legal developments by integrating a less anthropocentric approach and recognising ”different value systems” for the implementation of the GBF.
3. Ecocentric targets and implementing the rights of nature
The importance of respecting Indigenous peoples’ rights is even more significant since soft law targets, weak accountability mechanisms, and lack of financial and other support for implementation are all clear limitations of the CBD. Yet, perhaps the fundamental flaw of the CBD is its failure to adopt a more ecocentric approach: failure to recognise multiple values of nature and dealing with nature solely as a ‘resource’ is argued to be the key limitation to the CBD’s success so far. The GBF has pushed forward a clear path towards ecocentric and mother-earth-centric values, which should now be transformed into robust national targets.
By COP 16, Parties are expected to have revised and updated their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) to align with the GBF, including national targets communicated in a standardised format. NBSAPs are the main means of implementation since the CBD was initiated, although Parties can strengthen implementation efforts through domestic laws rather than rely on policy instruments which are often weak and are rarely adopted at the whole of government level, for example, by adopting legally binding national biodiversity targets. This presents a key opportunity for Parties to implement innovative ecocentric and non-market approaches to fulfil their legal obligations under the GBF.
A fundamental means by which nature’s intrinsic values, ecocentric and non-market approaches can be implemented is by adopting a Rights of Nature approach, whereby nature is granted legal rights to be considered alongside human, social and economic rights, and indeed corporate rights in decision making. A growing global “Rights of Nature” movement demonstrates significant success in incorporating ecocentric approaches to nature in decision-making and thus affords a higher level of protection for nature. Indeed, as the emerging jurisprudence of the Ecuadorian courts demonstrates, the recognition and proclamation of the Rights of Nature have consequences for the approach to biodiversity. Through numerous rulings, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has clarified the specific rights of various natural entities, from rivers and forest ecosystems to biodiversity habitats and nature’s rights have been placed ahead of economic/corporate rights in many cases.
New Zealand and many other countries such as Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Uganda, Bangladesh and Spain have now adopted rights of nature understandings supporting intrinsic non-market value approaches to nature. This highlights the need to embrace non-anthropocentric approaches to biodiversity that support the intrinsic value approach embedded in the CBD. As Spain noted in its report: “Biodiversity has intrinsic value and therefore its conservation is an ethical responsibility of society as a whole.” New Zealand notes in its biodiversity strategy that “Species and ecosystems are valuable in their own right and have their own right to exist and be healthy and thriving now and in the future, regardless of human use and appreciation.”
An important lesson from countries such as New Zealand and Spain, which have embedded rights of nature and legal personality of natural entities in their laws, highlights the need to ensure that the guardianship or representative institutions that are created to speak on behalf of these natural entities have a proper budget to be able to comply with their role. In Colombia, the guardianship body for the river Atrato has suffered from a lack of resources for community guardians and threats from illegal mining, thus impeding its functioning. In that sense, there is a financial need to support the rights of nature institutions, calling for the GBF to support these as part of the mother-earth-centric approaches put forward in the GBF.
Implementing ecocentric approaches contributes to translating the GBF into resolute national action and is a key issue for COP 16 in Cali. It is important to enable Parties to report their progress towards ecocentric actions in their National Reports. Yet, the indicators for targets 19 and 14 do not relate to ecocentric and non-market approaches. Further, none of the guiding questions for national target setting concern non-market approaches. These omissions should be rectified to allow successes at domestic levels to be recognised and reported and further encourage the implementation of ecocentric approaches as an effective means of biodiversity conservation.
Conclusion
COP 16 constitutes a defining moment in terms of international law and its approach to nature – either further pushing for a market-based approach to biodiversity credits and other forms of market values to biodiversity or supporting a more intrinsic value approach supporting the emergence of ecocentric approaches to nature. For years, market-based mechanisms developed under the climate framework have been heavily promoted as the only way to generate finance to address climate change despite their widely reported serious flaws and risks to communities and the planet. The dangers of market-based mechanisms and their negative impacts on many IPLC have been highlighted in a recent report highlighting how it has led “to a rush of carbon deals, to grab carbon rights in as much forest land as quickly and cheaply as possible in anticipation of prices rising” resulting to unfair deals between powerful and well-informed international companies and poor countries and communities, to outright violent evictions and other human rights abuses.
There is a danger of seeing the CBD adopting the same trajectory, as such the GBF’s focus on intrinsic value, non-market and mother-centric approaches to protect and preserve biodiversity offers a unique chance for international environmental law to support a non-anthropocentric, non-market approach to nature. This distinct opportunity should not be missed, and for this reason, COP 16 should receive the full attention of the international legal community to turn the promise to properly integrate nature’s intrinsic value in international law and to live in harmony with nature into a reality.
Introduction
Globally, biodiversity is in crisis with one million species under threat of extinction and rapid declines in ecosystem functioning, overreaching planetary boundaries. International law initiatives to address this massive decline in biodiversity are led by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Between 21 October and 1 November 2024, the city of Cali in Colombia will host the sixteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 16). COP 16 comes at a crucial time to assess and turn the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) into a reality. The framework includes a number of ambitious goals, including a commitment to designate at least 30 per cent of global land and sea as protected areas (known as the “30 by 30” initiative).
COP 16 is centered around 3 main objectives: (1) translating the Biodiversity Plan into resolute national action, (2) mobilising and bolstering means of implementation, and (3) accelerating progress on access and benefit-sharing. Beneath these headlines, a key means to enhance actions towards the GBF is through promoting nature’s intrinsic values during implementation, as recognised by the CBD through two of the GBF targets (Target 19 and Target 14). As such, the GBF is joining the growing global movement that recognises nature’s intrinsic value by assigning “rights to nature”, notably under the leadership of many Indigenous people’s communities. This focus on nature’s intrinsic value supports many of the key objectives of the CBD as well as the respect and protection of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLC) traditional ecological knowledge and practices. The next COP on biodiversity offers an opportunity to affirm and protect the intrinsic value of nature and to challenge dominant market-based approaches to nature, which have failed repeatedly.
1. The CBD and how it values nature: From anthropocentrism to nature’s intrinsic value
Despite a brief nod to the intrinsic value of biodiversity in the preamble to the 1992 Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD), the dominant approach adopted by the CBD has been based upon an anthropocentric foundation of nature’s value to humans, including human wellbeing, but largely supporting capitalist economic systems. This is reflected not only in the text of the convention, global biodiversity targets, strategic plans and COP decisions but also in the soft law approach taken to address the conservation objective, as opposed to the hard law protocols developed for the second and third objectives of sustainable development and access and benefit sharing. A target-based mechanism continues to be adopted as opposed to a more progressive approach but has clearly not worked, and slow progress is being made towards the GBF action targets.
Perhaps the most important development in the GBF is that it now references ecocentric approaches for implementation. Action Target 19 focuses on the ambitious call for financial mobilisation of $200 Billion per Year for Biodiversity but also references the value of ecocentric collective actions. Target 19(f) states that “Enhancing the role of collective actions, including by indigenous peoples and local communities, Mother Earth centric actions and non-market- based approaches including community based natural resource management and civil society cooperation and solidarity aimed at the conservation of biodiversity.” Mother Earth-centric actions are defined in a footnote as: Ecocentric and rights-based approach enabling the implementation of actions towards harmonic and complementary relationships between peoples and nature, promoting the continuity of all living beings and their communities and ensuring the non-commodification of environmental functions of Mother Earth.
These targets provide a clear hook for countries to encourage the implementation of ecocentric approaches and to reduce the human-nature binary by enabling harmonic and complimentary relationships between them. Action Target 19 clearly recognises the indispensable role of IPLC and other groups who act for biodiversity, and Parties can implement co-beneficial actions for biodiversity and improve IPLC rights. Target 14 calls for the full integration of biodiversity and its multiple values into decision-making at all levels and across all sectors, in particular, thus promoting a voice for nature in all decision-making that impacts biodiversity. Elevating the voice of those with less power in decision making, such as IPLC, women, youth and others who represent nature, to enable their full and effective participation could mainstream intrinsic and relational values of nature into decision-making.
2. Indigenous peoples and local communities rights: Recognising relational approaches to nature
There is a significant overlap between the world’s areas of high biodiversity and Indigenous territories, and the role of IPLC has been recognised as a key factor in protecting the world’s biodiversity. On this front, the GBF goes further than any previous major international policy framework, highlighting the diversity of approaches to human-nature relationships, including many Indigenous worldviews, such as the references to Mother Earth associated with many indigenous cultures. The GBF also joins the international human rights jurisprudence recognising Indigenous peoples’ rights to maintain and protect their non-anthropocentric approaches and relationship with nature. Notably, the very rich jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights highlights the complementary between Indigenous peoples’ rights, biodiversity protection and the rights to a healthy environment.
Adopting a non-anthropocentric approach, in a 2017 advisory opinion, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights also highlighted that “the right to a healthy environment, unlike other rights, protects the components of the environment, such as forests, rivers and seas, as legal interests in themselves, even in the absence of the certainty or evidence of a risk to individuals.” This is a very significant development highlighting that human rights law supports a non-anthropocentric approach to law recognising the inherent rights of natural entities. This is also part of a wider body of international law supporting the view that environmental sustainability and respect for Indigenous peoples’ human rights are closely intertwined and complementary. From this perspective, the GBF is contributing to these legal developments by integrating a less anthropocentric approach and recognising ”different value systems” for the implementation of the GBF.
3. Ecocentric targets and implementing the rights of nature
The importance of respecting Indigenous peoples’ rights is even more significant since soft law targets, weak accountability mechanisms, and lack of financial and other support for implementation are all clear limitations of the CBD. Yet, perhaps the fundamental flaw of the CBD is its failure to adopt a more ecocentric approach: failure to recognise multiple values of nature and dealing with nature solely as a ‘resource’ is argued to be the key limitation to the CBD’s success so far. The GBF has pushed forward a clear path towards ecocentric and mother-earth-centric values, which should now be transformed into robust national targets.
By COP 16, Parties are expected to have revised and updated their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) to align with the GBF, including national targets communicated in a standardised format. NBSAPs are the main means of implementation since the CBD was initiated, although Parties can strengthen implementation efforts through domestic laws rather than rely on policy instruments which are often weak and are rarely adopted at the whole of government level, for example, by adopting legally binding national biodiversity targets. This presents a key opportunity for Parties to implement innovative ecocentric and non-market approaches to fulfil their legal obligations under the GBF.
A fundamental means by which nature’s intrinsic values, ecocentric and non-market approaches can be implemented is by adopting a Rights of Nature approach, whereby nature is granted legal rights to be considered alongside human, social and economic rights, and indeed corporate rights in decision making. A growing global “Rights of Nature” movement demonstrates significant success in incorporating ecocentric approaches to nature in decision-making and thus affords a higher level of protection for nature. Indeed, as the emerging jurisprudence of the Ecuadorian courts demonstrates, the recognition and proclamation of the Rights of Nature have consequences for the approach to biodiversity. Through numerous rulings, Ecuador’s Constitutional Court has clarified the specific rights of various natural entities, from rivers and forest ecosystems to biodiversity habitats and nature’s rights have been placed ahead of economic/corporate rights in many cases.
New Zealand and many other countries such as Bolivia, Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Uganda, Bangladesh and Spain have now adopted rights of nature understandings supporting intrinsic non-market value approaches to nature. This highlights the need to embrace non-anthropocentric approaches to biodiversity that support the intrinsic value approach embedded in the CBD. As Spain noted in its report: “Biodiversity has intrinsic value and therefore its conservation is an ethical responsibility of society as a whole.” New Zealand notes in its biodiversity strategy that “Species and ecosystems are valuable in their own right and have their own right to exist and be healthy and thriving now and in the future, regardless of human use and appreciation.”
An important lesson from countries such as New Zealand and Spain, which have embedded rights of nature and legal personality of natural entities in their laws, highlights the need to ensure that the guardianship or representative institutions that are created to speak on behalf of these natural entities have a proper budget to be able to comply with their role. In Colombia, the guardianship body for the river Atrato has suffered from a lack of resources for community guardians and threats from illegal mining, thus impeding its functioning. In that sense, there is a financial need to support the rights of nature institutions, calling for the GBF to support these as part of the mother-earth-centric approaches put forward in the GBF.
Implementing ecocentric approaches contributes to translating the GBF into resolute national action and is a key issue for COP 16 in Cali. It is important to enable Parties to report their progress towards ecocentric actions in their National Reports. Yet, the indicators for targets 19 and 14 do not relate to ecocentric and non-market approaches. Further, none of the guiding questions for national target setting concern non-market approaches. These omissions should be rectified to allow successes at domestic levels to be recognised and reported and further encourage the implementation of ecocentric approaches as an effective means of biodiversity conservation.
Conclusion
COP 16 constitutes a defining moment in terms of international law and its approach to nature – either further pushing for a market-based approach to biodiversity credits and other forms of market values to biodiversity or supporting a more intrinsic value approach supporting the emergence of ecocentric approaches to nature. For years, market-based mechanisms developed under the climate framework have been heavily promoted as the only way to generate finance to address climate change despite their widely reported serious flaws and risks to communities and the planet. The dangers of market-based mechanisms and their negative impacts on many IPLC have been highlighted in a recent report highlighting how it has led “to a rush of carbon deals, to grab carbon rights in as much forest land as quickly and cheaply as possible in anticipation of prices rising” resulting to unfair deals between powerful and well-informed international companies and poor countries and communities, to outright violent evictions and other human rights abuses.
There is a danger of seeing the CBD adopting the same trajectory, as such the GBF’s focus on intrinsic value, non-market and mother-centric approaches to protect and preserve biodiversity offers a unique chance for international environmental law to support a non-anthropocentric, non-market approach to nature. This distinct opportunity should not be missed, and for this reason, COP 16 should receive the full attention of the international legal community to turn the promise to properly integrate nature’s intrinsic value in international law and to live in harmony with nature into a reality.
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