Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta’s review presents the first comprehensive economic framework of its kind for biodiversity. It calls for urgent and transformative change in how we think, act and measure economic success to protect and enhance our prosperity and the natural world.
The Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region enjoys an exuberant natural wealth; with 16% of the planets land, the region is home to 40% of the world’s biological diversity. This report investigates and provides a good overview of the regions efforts to mainstream natural capital and biodiversity concerns into public policy. It also provides a series of policy tools and instruments: payments for ecosystems services, innovation in managing protected areas, conservation trust funds, nature-based solutions for infrastructure, small-scale sustainable fisheries management, natural capital and ecosystem accounting, and ecosystem-based adaptation in agriculture.
The 16th edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report analyses the risks from societal fractures—manifested through persistent and emerging risks to human health, rising unemployment, widening digital divides, youth disillusionment, and geopolitical fragmentation. Environmental degradation—still an existential threat to humanity—risks intersecting with societal fractures to bring about severe consequences.
The Aligning Biodiversity Measures for Business collaboration has recently published a review paper on the drivers and current practice around business measurement, reporting and disclosure and the role of these approaches in future business disclosure for informing global policy targets.
Thirty years ago, UNDP created a new way to conceive and measure progress. Instead of using growth in GDP as the sole measure of development, we ranked the world’s countries by their human development: by whether people in each country have the freedom and opportunity to live the lives they value. The 2020 Human Development Report (HDR) doubles down on the belief that people’s agency and empowerment can bring about the action we need if we are to live in balance with the planet in a fairer world. It shows that we are at an unprecedented moment in history, in which human activity has become a dominant force shaping the planet. These impacts interact with existing inequalities, threatening significant development reversals. Nothing short of a great transformation – in how we live, work and cooperate – is needed to change the path we are on. The Report explores how to jumpstart that transformation.
The report “Birds and Biodiversity Targets” uses BirdLife’s extensive worldwide research to provide a road map to ensure the 2020s are not just another “lost decade for nature”. As well as outlining the shortfalls of each of the targets, this publication also brings a message of hope to the world, using bird conservation successes to show that solutions exist for the problems facing the biosphere, and that nature can recover swiftly when these are enacted.
Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) are booming, synthetic ETFs are re-surfacing and semi-transparent ETFs have recently emerged – but their structures hide entrenched deforestation risk from investors. Planet Tracker identifies the key decision makers for each instrument in the growing ETF universe and calls for specific actions from index providers, ETF sponsors and investors to eliminate hidden deforestation risk in their holdings or indices. Conclusions shown in the report are based on the analysis carried out to 26 public companies involved in the production, processing and trade of soybeans and with links to deforestation. This report identifies USD 9.3 billion held by equity- based ETFs in these companies. The top 10 asset managers with underlying funds identified as investors in these ETFs include Bank of Montreal, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, UBS, Envestnet and Northwestern Mutual.
Financing Nature. Closing the Global Financing Gap of Biodiversity, report by Paulson Institute, The Nature Conservancy and Conrnell Atkinson Center on Sustainability, estimated financial flows into global biodiversity conservation in 2019 as between US$ 124 and US$ 143 billion. This represents a near-tripling in funding since 2012 but, to put it in context, spending on agricultural, forestry, and fisheries subsidies that degrade nature is at least two to four times greater. And that does not include subsidies for fossil fuels.
