The Kunming- Montreal biodiversity conference led to what is being hailed as a pivotal and ground-breaking outcome agreement, with substantial faith involvement.
Of course, that will depend on the implementation and the financing, as well as the strength of regulation on carbon transfers. These are notorious for enabling continuing climate devastation rather than turning us towards real solutions, as noted in a press conference featuring youth activists.
The Temple of Understanding, as part of the Multifaith Coalition (pictured above), met with Elizabeth Mrema and delivered a set of priorities. These priorities had been hashed out months in advance, along with attendance at numerous preparatory meetings. Much of UN advocacy happens along the way, prior to the culminating conference.
In this meeting with Elizabeth Mrema, executive secretary of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, she called on the faith communities to bring the outcomes of the conference to local communities and to assist in translating them into a more common language for action.
The Temple of Understanding (TOU) used the occasion of being with so many colleagues from all over the United States and the world to convene a session bringing together the TOU, the Parliament of World’s Religions (PWR), and the United Religions Initiative’s (URI) leaders in climate work. There is no time for anything less than effective mutual communication, support, and collaboration to move our related but differentiated work forward.
The PWR is the largest interfaith convenor, the URI the largest grassroots interfaith organization, and the TOU is one of the oldest interfaith organizations, still going strong as a thought leader and collaborator.
All three organizations bring on youth and assist in developing their leadership, all with a passion for being effective in advocating at local, regional, and national levels around climate change issues.
The recording of the event:
The Species We Save May Be Our Own
Implementation will be key. Hopefully, the energy of the progress in establishing the framework will carry over into other areas of UN climate work, which is only increasingly essential. The Global Biodiversity Framework, as agreed, contains four goals:
- Halting human-induced extinction of threatened species and reducing the rate of extinction of all species tenfold by 2050;
- sustainable use and management of biodiversity to ensure that nature’s contributions to people are valued, maintained and enhanced;
- fair sharing of the benefits from the utilization of genetic resources, and digital sequence information on genetic resources;
- and that adequate means of implementing the GBF be accessible to all Parties, particularly Least Developed Countries and Small Island Developing States.
The framework also includes 23 targets, including:
- Effective conservation and management of at least 30 percent of the world’s land, coastal areas, and oceans. Currently, 17 percent of land and *8 percent of marine areas are under protection
- Restoration of 30 percent of terrestrial and marine ecosystems
- Reduce to near zero the loss of areas of high biodiversity importance and high ecological integrity
- Halving global food waste
- Phasing out or reforming subsidies that harm biodiversity by at least $500 billion per year while scaling up positive incentives for biodiversity conservation and sustainable use
- Mobilizing at least $200 billion per year from public and private sources for biodiversity-related funding
- Raising international financial flows from developed to developing countries to at least US$ 30 billion per year
- Requiring transnational companies and financial institutions to monitor, assess, and transparently disclose risks and impacts on biodiversity through their operations, portfolios, supply, and value chains
as published online by UNEP.
The Temple of Understanding has worked with UNEP for decades now and is committed to promoting implementation in every way we can.