A new key biodiversity platform for cross sectoral collaboration
For its inaugural launch, World Biodiversity Summit will help define what world leaders and the private sector in biodiversity and climate action need to do in the medium and long term to achieve sustainable development and hinder further biodiversity loss, focusing on partnerships and investment mechanisms as levers of progress. World Biodiversity Summit is a platform for responding to accelerating biodiversity loss, by using the Paris Agreement as a framework to learn from, promoting relevant solutions, innovations, and leadership networks, strengthening nature restoration and conservation. Nature-based solutions will be highlighted, from specificecosystems to global possibilities.
SPEAKERS
SPEAKERS
SPEAKERS
26 September 2024
SECOND, New York, USA
Climate Week NYC
27 October 2024
Cali, Colombia,
alongside UNCBD COP16
Creating Pathways for
Nature-Positive Investments
World Biodiversity Summit has grown since its inaugural year to become a leading platform tackling the most pressing issues in biodiversity and climate.
Returning for its fourth year, World Biodiversity Summit aims to facilitate solution-oriented partnerships to convert biodiversity protection goals into concrete actions guided by the Kunming – Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
World Biodiversity Summit measures impact through three indicators: Global, Sectoral and Organisational.
Until the world reaches its sustainability goals, including achieving net-zero emissions or protecting biodiversity, businesses need to do everything they can to avert more intense, irreversible climate and ecosystem meltdown. With the World Climate Foundation and through the World Biodiversity Summit, we are committed to work with partners and clients to change the game, plan transitions and disrupt existing industries.
Jean-Baptiste Perrin, Invent for Society Global Leader, Capgemini Invent
Global Impact
World Biodiversity Summit facilitates cross-sectoral collaboration to foster policies and spur investments in nature-based solutions to close the nature finance gap and accelerate the global transition to a green economy. The platform connects its members to global policies and guides them to successfully achieve the goals of global frameworks such as the Kunming – Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
Sectoral Impact
World Biodiversity Summit works closely with the key nature-dependent sectors to promote and scale up the best practices across the most nature-impactful areas (such as forestry, agriculture and the water systems) and identify nature-positive business opportunities. The Summit also facilitates the necessary cross-sector conversation around the required paradigm shift in our consumption patterns and the need for nature-driven policy and financial systems.
Organisational Impact
Working together with businesses, asset managers, asset owners, governments and civil society around the world, World Biodiversity Summit facilitates organisation-driven positive impact on nature.
By aligning different organisations across sectors with the global frameworks and existing nature partnerships, the summit aims to enhance biodiversity globally and to support nature-based solutions that can address both climate change and biodiversity loss, as well as create jobs.
The private sector has an essential role to contribute to achieving the new UN Global Biodiversity Framework. Thousands of companies are already acting and making commitments in different ways to help reverse nature loss, but it is clearly not enough! There is a voluntary action that is fragmented, that is why we also need the policy ambition to drive even more business action on the ground.
Eva Zabey, CEO, Business for Nature
Key Outcomes
World Biodiversity Summit catalyses ambitious pledges and best-case practices from its partners and speakers. During the Summits, we are delighted to act as a platform for our partners’ strong and impactful nature commitments.
2023
Business Action for Nature – A Growing Imperative: The interdependence of business on nature was underscored throughout the sessions of the day, highlighting nature conservation as an emergent priority for the business sector. As articulated by H.E. Razan Al Mubarak, the UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for COP28, the economic implications of biodiversity loss are stark and a nature-positive economy has the potential to create 400 million jobs.
Leading up to COP28, the Climate Champions team is calling to non-state actors to put nature at the heart of climate action by committing to five key principles:
1. Commit to science-based targets for both climate and nature.
2. Integrate nature into climate transition plans.
3. Assess the impacts and dependencies through the recommendations of the Taskforce on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) and the Taskforce on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD).
4. Eliminate commodity-driven deforestation.
5. Invest in nature-based solutions.
Recognising & Financing the Invaluable Value of Nature: The Summit highlighted the need for a shared understanding and common language on biodiversity across government, finance and science sectors for effective collaboration and decision-making. Martin Præstegaard, the CEO
of ATP, emphasised biodiversity as a significant risk to the financial sector and stressed the integration of biodiversity into financial disclosure. The need to accelerate information flow on the benefits of financing nature and accurately price proxies, reflecting both climate change and biodiversity, is more critical than ever for advancing nature markets.
Bridging Climate & Nature: Prof. Dr. Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, emphasised nature's incredible ability to maintain climate balance by absorbing CO2 as a stress response to warming. Climate change proves that we have disrupted this fragile balance by burning fossil fuels and destroying ecosystems. Our foremost priority now must be to help nature recover to continue sequestering greenhouse gases. It is as clear as it gets: without healthy biodiversity, we will not achieve our decarbonisation goals.
Accelerating Change Through Incentivising Framework & Policy: The Summit highlighted the urgent need for transparent, robust policies and standardised frameworks as catalysts to incentivise the private sector and expedite our progress in safeguarding biodiversity. Current government efforts have fallen short of creating an enabling environment for businesses alone. In discussing renewable energy, Rasmus Skov, the Head of Global External Affairs and Positioning at Ørsted stressed the imperative of integrating the biodiversity agenda into policy frameworks to facilitate its mainstream adoption.
Shared Responsibility & Benefits for Water Stewardship, Regenerative Forestry & Agriculture: Rethinking land and water management is crucial for environmental and human health and climate regulation affecting every sector. The private sector must adopt a more integrated nature-people-climate-positive approach that incorporates the expertise and knowledge of various stakeholders while providing incentives for all, including indigenous communities and farmers.
Amplifying Indigenous Insights for a Nature-Positive Future: Inclusion and diversity in voices, especially indigenous knowledge was a cornerstone of our discussions. Indigenous communities hold a reservoir of wisdom on nature cultivated over generations. This inherent knowledge can aid biodiversity preservation, land and water management when integrated with technologies and embedded in modelling methods, business and national plans and more.