COP17: The world is waging a ‘war on nature’ as progress on biodiversity targets falters by UN News, CBD, IPBES, Carbon Brief, agencies 11:38am 16th Oct, 2026   Biodiversity is the natural world around us, and the variety of all of the different kinds of organisms - the plants, animals, insects and micro-organisms that live on our planet.    Every one of these live and work together in ecosystems to maintain and support life on earth, and exist in delicate balance. Biodiversity is one of the most precious and important things we have.    Without biological diversity, our entire support system for human, as well as animal life, would collapse. We rely on nature to provide us with food and clean water, for medicines, to prevent flooding and other extreme weather effects. So much is provided by the natural ecosystems around us – they’re truly vital to life on earth. Because biodiversity is so crucial to our future survival, its loss is a crisis on a global scale.    15 Oct. 2026    COP17: The world is waging a ‘war on nature’ as progress on biodiversity targets falters. (UN News)    Fewer than half of the national targets set to protect the world’s plants, animals and ecosystems are on track the UN warns in a new report, days before countries gather in Yerevan, Armenia, for the COP17 international biodiversity conference.    The landmark deal struck in Montreal in 2022 – the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework – set out a vision of “living in harmony with nature” by 2050, with urgent action needed by 2030. The new report underlines that the world is falling behind.    One of the flagship goals was to protect at least 30 per cent of the world’s land, inland waters, coasts and oceans by 2030. Yet even if current commitments are met, only 26 per cent of land and 12 per cent of the ocean would be protected by that deadline, the report finds. Progress is also lagging on funding, cooperation and data, as well as on economic incentives that reward protecting nature rather than destroying it.    “Biodiversity underpins life on Earth.. Safeguarding biological diversity is essential to the health of our planet, the resilience of our economies and the wellbeing of all people", highlighted UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres at the report’s launch .    “The bad news is the war on nature has not ended. The world is still caught in three interlinked crises: climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution", said Mr. Guterres .    There has been some progress since 2022, the report notes. Nearly 90 per cent of countries that are parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity have set national targets, and more than half have drawn up their own plans to deliver them. More than 70 per cent have measured and reported on their results – though the report warns of a serious gap between ambition and action.    Indigenous Peoples, local communities, regional and city authorities, charities and some committed businesses have made commitments to advance local programs to protect nature.    Confronting the challenges of biodiversity loss will require greater funding to support developing countries on a far bigger scale, the report says. All Governments need to scrap subsidies that harm nature, redirect spending towards protecting nature and work with businesses on much strong disclosure rules.    Better coordination is also needed between governments, business, civil society, young people, women and Indigenous Peoples to strengthen accountability, enforcement and cooperation.    “Biodiversity must be part of every decision being made – across policies, regulations and budgets,” Mr. Guterres said. “Nature won’t survive on good intentions.”    15 Oct. 2025    UN Secretary-General's Press Conference on the Launch of the State of Biodiversity Action Report:    "Four years ago, the world established the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Guided by 23 targets, the Framework sets out a clear pathway to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, and ease the pressures that are driving our planet’s natural systems to the brink.    The global progress report being launched today measures our actions against this bold vision. It shows that nearly 90 per cent of Parties to the Convention have established national biodiversity targets. Over half have set out their own national roadmaps for delivery, and many more are nearing completion. More than 70 per cent have measured and reported on results.    And stakeholders have made 5,000 commitments so far — including Indigenous Peoples, local communities, subnational governments, non-governmental organizations and the private sector. But the report also shows a striking gap between ambition and action.    So, let me also give you the bad news. Fewer than half of national biodiversity targets are on track. For example, if current commitments are met, only 26 per cent of terrestrial ecosystems, and 12 per cent of marine ecosystems, would be protected by 2030. That is well short of the 30x30 target agreed in Montreal.    We also see major gaps in targets linked to economic systems, including those focused on reducing harmful incentives and promoting nature-positive ones. And the report shows that many of the critical elements of progress — including finance, capacity, cooperation and data — are still missing in action.    This bad news means that the war on nature has not yet ended, and we still live the dramatic combination of the three global crises: the crisis of climate change, the crisis of loss of biodiversity and crisis of pollution – that are all interlinked.    Now, the evidence contained in this report points us to where we need to go, if we want to overcome these three crises and end the war on nature.    Finance and capacity for developing countries must be mobilized at scale. Countries must honour their official development assistance commitments. Goverments need to end harmful incentives and subsidies, strengthen social protection measures, redirect spending to nature-positive outcomes, and work with businesses to ensure strong disclosure agreements.    Biodiversity must be part of every decision being made — across policies, regulations and budgets. And we also need to coordinate across sectors and continue addressing all the drivers of biodiversity loss — including land-use change, climate change, invasive alien species, pollution and the direct exploitation of natural resources. Everything is interlinked.    Accountability and enforcement must be strengthened throughout, along with international cooperation. And we need partnerships across the public and private sectors, and with civil society, young people, women and Indigenous Groups, whose traditional knowledge and resource-management practices stretch back millennia.    Nature won’t thrive on good intentions. Guided by the evidence in this report, we can begin to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and secure the natural foundations upon which all human life and prosperity depend.    Spokesperson: We'll take a question in the room from Monika, please.    Question: I'm Monika Yeritsyan, EcoNews Information Agency journalist. My question is for Mr. Guterres. For the protection of biodiversity, the usual appeal to governments is to increase investments for preserving biodiversity. Whilst economic and financial systems continue to incentivize types of activities that result in the loss of that biodiversity, they harm nature. My question is this, whether the main challenge for biodiversity conservation is finance. Is it the inadequacy of investments, or have we reached a point where we are simply unable to change the economic models that harm nature? And so in your opinion, what change do governments and financial economic systems have to make to really achieve the targets that we will be speaking about at COP over the next two weeks, so as to achieve biodiversity conservation in reality?    UN Secretary-General: In my opinion, the central question is a question of power. We still have too much power of the fossil fuel industry. We still have too much power of those that make a fortune destroying forests in many parts of the world. We still have too much power for those that overfish. We still have too much power for those that, in many countries of the world, because they retain the economic power, have a very strong influence in the political power.    What we need is to change these power relations. And we have an ally, and that ally is the fact that things are changing. Look at the question of fossil fuels. Today, fossil fuels are more expensive than renewables. And about safety, after what happened in the Gulf and what happens in the Black Sea - these conflicts, it is clear that renewables are much safer than fossil fuels. So things are changing in the world and it will help us to change the power relations, to make sure that governments will be more strongly committed to fight the loss of biodiversity.; and at the same time that we are able to multiply the resources that exist today in order to finance the support to biodiversity..    I'm hopeful that power relations are changing, and we need to multiply the resources available, and there are ways to do so. Bureaucracies are making it difficult to change. Sometimes governments are making it difficult to change, but what is obvious, sooner or later, we will win.    Spokesperson: We're going to Nick Perry from AFP. Nick.    Question: Nick Perry from AFP. A question for the Secretary-General. Given the lack of progress that you have outlined in meeting the global biodiversity targets, but also the difficulty in finding consensus among countries at the moment at a multilateral level. Are you really confident that this summit can find some common ground between countries to make progress and not just more pledges and more commitments? Can they actually work towards achieving the commitments that have already been made?    UN Secretary-General: Well, first of all, I spoke about good news and bad news. So it's not all bad news. There is some progress since the Kunming-Monreal global framework. There is progress, but not enough. We are far from what is necessary. . We remain really hopeful that this COP will be a success. It will not solve once and for all the problems of the loss of biodiversity because of the power questions I mentioned, but it can make real progress in moving forward with a much stronger speed".    http://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/statements/2026-10-16/secretary-generals-remarks-the-leaders-summit-biodiversity-cop-17-delivered http://www.unep.org/en/news-and-stories/speech/ed-press-statement-launch-state-biodiversity-report-cop17-leaders-summit http://www.cbd.int/conferences/2026 http://www.cbd.int/globalreview/report2026 http://wwf.panda.org/wwf_news/press_releases/?16397466/Yerevan-Declaration-recognises-not-enough-biodiversity-action-but-leaves-key-commitments-unresolved    http://www.ipbes.net/bba-report/media-release http://www.ipbes.net/transformative-change/media-release http://www.ipbes.net/nexus/media-release http://www.ipbes.net/models-drivers-biodiversity-ecosystem-change http://www.foei.org/playing-nice-with-business-wont-save-biodiversity/ http://www.sei.org/features/sei-biodiversity-cop17-recommendations/ http://www.sei.org/features/business-guide-biodiversity-cop17/    http://interactive.carbonbrief.org/nature-targets-2030-progress/index.html http://www.carbonbrief.org/cop17-developed-countries-fall-far-short-of-un-targets-for-nature-finance http://www.carbonbrief.org/interactive-tracking-negotiating-texts-at-the-cop17-biodiversity-summit http://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20261012-nature-does-not-respect-borders-un-biodiversity-chief http://www.unepfi.org/themes/ecosystems/on-the-road-to-cop17-a-conversation-with-astrid-schomaker-executive-secretary-of-the-convention-on-biological-diversity/    http://www.genevaenvironmentnetwork.org/events/human-rights-at-the-17th-conference-of-the-parties-to-the-convention-on-biological-diversity-hrc63-side-event/ http://www.ohchr.org/en/statements-and-speeches/2026/10/five-years-recognition-right-healthy-environment-un-experts-urge http://www.ohchr.org/en/topic/climate-change-and-environment http://www.genevaenvironmentnetwork.org/resources/updates/from-geneva-to-yerevan-international-geneva-un-biodiversity-conference/ http://wwf.panda.org/?16340466/The-road-to-Yerevan-Accelerating-action-on-global-biodiversity-goals http://www.clientearth.org/media/dh3pypuj/clientearth-cop17-legal-wins-for-people-and-nature-d5-1.pdf http://www.ciel.org/news/unga-81-renewing-environmental-multilateralism/    http://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/ http://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/planetary-health-check-2026-finds-mounting-pressures-across-earth2019s-life-support-systems http://10insightsclimate.science/ http://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/rising-emissions-have-locked-in-future-climate-impacts-but-the-scale-of-damage-still-depends-on-action-taken-now-2013-10-new-insights-from-climate-science http://unfccc.int/news/un-climate-chief-the-climate-alarm-is-blaring-from-every-direction http://wmo.int/news/media-centre/new-report-suggests-more-global-temperature-records-ahead http://wmo.int/news/media-centre/earths-climate-swings-increasingly-out-of-balance http://www.un.org/scientific-advisory-board/en/earth-system-tipping-points-0 http://www.unep.org/en/publications/report/global-environment-outlook-7 http://futureearth.org/the-invisible-threat-how-microplastics-are-rewiring-our-planets-climate-and-ecosystems/    July 2026    World falling short on 22 of 23 nature targets for 2030, says draft UN report - Carbon Brief    The global goal to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030 “will not be achieved” unless action by countries “accelerates rapidly”, says a draft UN report.    Countries are falling short on 22 of the 23 targets for 2030 they set under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), the “Paris Agreement for nature”.    That is according to a draft version of a global report prepared by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), published on 26 July.    The report identifies “distinct gaps in progress”, relating to ambition and implementation, with countries are not taking sufficient action to achieve their targets. Progress is “particularly lagging” for addressing the “indirect drivers of biodiversity loss”, such as harmful business practices and government subsidies promoting them.    Elsewhere, the draft says that countries have “reported gaps in the scale and timely provision” of “financial resources, capacity-building and development, technical and scientific cooperation, access to and transfer of technology, and knowledge sharing”.    It adds: “These barriers can result in uneven capacities and cause specific technical and financial constraints for all parties, but particularly for developing-country parties. It is likely these constraints are even more pressing for least developed countries and small island developing states.”    Progress is “insufficient” on target 18, which calls on countries to identify subsidies and other incentives that are harmful for biodiversity by 2025, says the GBF report.    Target 7 of the GBF focuses on tackling pollution from pesticides, chemicals, plastic and other sources. It calls for countries to reduce pollution risks and negative impacts “from all sources” to “levels that are not harmful” to biodiversity and ecosystems by 2030.    The draft report finds that there is insufficient progress on 60% of national targets categorised as being highly aligned with target 7. Only one-third of these national targets (35%) are on track to be achieved by 2030. Progress on raising biodiversity finance has been “insufficient”, according to the report..    http://www.carbonbrief.org/world-falling-short-on-22-of-23-nature-targets-for-2030-says-draft-un-report http://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-84-of-nations-miss-deadline-to-identify-nature-harming-subsidies-by-2025 http://www.cbd.int/article/2026-07-27-nairobi-meetings http://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/61/36 http://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/over-1-trillion-of-annual-gdp-in-europe-china-and-usa-depends-on-rainfall-linked-to-forest-ecosystems-that-are-too-big-to-fail-report-finds/ http://unu.edu/inweh/collection/global-water-bankruptcy    Mar. 2026    Nature is everybody’s business - Dr. David Obura, Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services    * In 2023, global public and private finance flows with directly negative impacts on nature, were estimated at $7.3 trillion, of which private finance accounted for $4.9 trillion, with public spending on environmentally harmful subsidies of about $2.4 trillion.    * Less than 1% of publicly reporting companies mention their impacts on biodiversity in their reports.    Every business depends on biodiversity, and every business impacts biodiversity. The growth of the global economy has been at the cost of immense biodiversity loss, which now poses a critical and pervasive systemic risk to the economy, financial stability and human wellbeing. This is a central finding of a landmark new report published today by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).    Even companies that might seem far-removed from nature or that do not see themselves as nature-based rely, directly or indirectly, on material inputs, regulation of environmental conditions. Yet, businesses often bear little or no financial cost for their negative impacts on the environmental conditions we all depend on for life. Businesses are central to halting and reversing biodiversity loss.    The IPBES Business and Biodiversity Assessment report finds that the current conditions in which businesses operate are not compatible with achieving a just and sustainable future, and that these conditions also perpetuate systemic risks.    Businesses often face inadequate or perverse incentives, barriers that hinder efforts to reverse nature’s decline, an institutional environment with insufficient support, enforcement and compliance, as well as significant gaps in data and knowledge. These combine with business models that result in ever-increasing material consumption and an emphasis on reporting quarterly earnings, whilst contributing to the degradation of nature around the world.    The Report makes the point that fundamental change is possible and necessary to create an enabling environment to align what is profitable for business with what is beneficial for biodiversity and people.    “This Report draws on thousands of sources, bringing together years of research and practice into a single integrated framework that shows both the risks of nature loss to business, and the opportunities for business to help reverse this,” said Matt Jones (UK), one of three Co-chairs of the Assessment.    “This is a pivotal moment for businesses and financial institutions, as well as Governments and civil society, to cut through the confusion of countless methods and metrics, and to use the clarity and coherence offered by the Report to take meaningful steps towards transformative change. Businesses and other key actors can either lead the way towards a more sustainable global economy or ultimately risk extinction…both of species in nature, but potentially also their own.”    Business-as-usual incentives are driving nature’s decline and do not support the transformative change necessary to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.    For example, large subsidies that drive losses of biodiversity are directed to business activities with the support of lobbying by businesses and trade associations.    In 2023, global public and private finance flows with directly negative impacts on nature, were estimated at $7.3 trillion, of which private finance accounted for $4.9 trillion, with public spending on environmentally harmful subsidies of about $2.4 trillion.    In contrast, $220 billion in public and private finance flows were directed in 2023 to activities contributing to the conservation and restoration of biodiversity, representing just 3% of the public funds and incentives that encourage harmful business behaviour or prevent behaviour beneficial to biodiversity.    “The loss of biodiversity is among the most serious threats to business”, said Prof. Stephen Polasky (USA), Co-chair of the Assessment. “Yet the twisted reality is that it often seems more profitable to businesses to degrade biodiversity than to protect it. Business as usual may once have seemed profitable in the short term, but impacts across multiple businesses can have cumulative effects, aggregating to global impacts, which can cross ecological tipping points.    The Report shows that business as usual is not inevitable – with the right policies, as well as financial and cultural shifts, what is good for nature is also what is best for profitability. To get there, the Report offers tools for choosing more effective measurements and analysis.”    The Report finds that a wide range of methods, knowledge and data exist for measuring business impacts and dependencies, which can already inform decisions and action. Yet less than 1% of publicly reporting companies mention their impacts on biodiversity in their reports.    The Report makes it clear that all businesses, including financial institutions, have a responsibility to address their impacts and dependencies. The authors point out in their report the many actions that businesses can take now that benefit business and biodiversity.    “Better engagement with nature is not optional for business – it is a necessity”, said Prof. Rueda. “This is vital for their bottom line, long-term prosperity and the transformative change needed for a more just and sustainable future. To avoid greenwashing though, it is essential that businesses have transparent and credible strategies, which clearly demonstrate their actions and how they contribute to biodiversity outcomes and that they publicly disclose their impacts and dependencies as well as their lobbying activities”.    The Report explores both actions that can be taken by businesses themselves and ‘signalling’ actions that can publicly influence and inspire action by others.    Another central message of the Report is that businesses cannot, by themselves, deliver the scale of change needed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Collaboration, collective and individual actions are essential to create an enabling environment where businesses contribute to a just and sustainable future.    Five specific components are identified as central to such an enabling environment: policy, legal and regulatory frameworks; economic and financial systems; social values, norms and culture; technology and data; and capacity and knowledge. The Report provides more than 100 specific examples of concrete actions that can be taken, across each of these five components, by businesses, governments, financial actors and civil society.    “Better stewardship of biodiversity is central to managing risk across the whole of the economy and throughout societies – it’s not some distant environmental issue, but a core challenge now in every boardroom and cabinet-room,” said Prof. Polasky.    “We need to move beyond the fallacy of a binary choice between governments and decision-makers being either pro-environment or pro-business. All business depends on nature, so actions that conserve and sustainably use nature can also be those that help businesses thrive in the long-term.    One of the innovations of this Report is that it provides a template for accelerating collaboration and collective actions at all levels among and by governments, financial actors, other actors including civil society, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, consumers, NGOs, international organisations, and academia in addition to the action needed by businesses and financial institutions themselves.”    Speaking about the significance of the Business and Biodiversity Report, Dr. David Obura, Chair of IPBES said: “This IPBES Assessment Report was delivered with urgency, as a vital contribution to efforts by businesses, governments, financial actors and the whole of society to meet the goals and targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework, the Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change".    "It relates very directly to Target 15 of the Global Biodiversity Framework, which focuses on businesses, but ultimately to all our shared global goals because businesses are at the centre of how our economies, and large parts of our society, depend on and impact nature”.    "Nature is everybody’s business and the conservation, restoration and sustainable use of biodiversity is central to business sustainability and success".    http://www.ipbes.net/bba-report/media-release http://www.ipbes.net/business-impact http://webtv.un.org/en/asset/k1y/k1yl72cx8w http://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/time-to-align-economic-practice-with-ecological-reality-the-critical-need-to-include-nature-in-macroeconomic-models/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2026/02/a-business-necessity-align-with-nature-or-risk-collapse-ipbes-report-warns/ http://www.foei.org/playing-nice-with-business-wont-save-biodiversity/ http://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/biodiversity http://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/biodiversity/ http://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminstitute/news/governments-must-protect-nature-or-pay-a-higher-price-for-borrowing-study-finds/    Dec. 2024    IPBES: Tackle Together Five Interlinked Global Crises in Biodiversity, Water, Food, Health and Climate Change.    Environmental, social and economic crises – such as biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, health risks and climate change – are all interconnected. They interact, cascade and compound each other in ways that make separate efforts to address them ineffective and counterproductive.    Underlines the landmark new report launched by the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The Assessment Report on the Interlinkages among Biodiversity, Water, Food and Health – known as the Nexus Report - offers decision-makers around the world the most ambitious scientific assessment ever undertaken of these complex interconnections and explores more than five dozen specific response options to maximize co-benefits across five ‘nexus elements’: biodiversity, water, food, health and climate change.    The report is the product of three years of work by 165 leading international experts from 57 countries from all regions of the world. It finds that existing actions to address these challenges fail to tackle the complexity of interlinked problems and result in inconsistent governance.    “We have to move decisions and actions beyond single-issue silos to better manage, govern and improve the impact of actions in one nexus element on other elements,” said Prof. Paula Harrison (United Kingdom), co-chair of the Assessment with Prof. Pamela McElwee (USA).    “Take for example the health challenge of schistosomiasis (also known as bilharzia) – a parasitic disease that can cause life-long ill health and which affects more than 200 million people worldwide – especially in Africa.    Treated only as a health challenge – usually through medication – the problem often recurs as people are reinfected. An innovative project in rural Senegal took a different approach – reducing water pollution and removing invasive water plants to reduce the habitat for the snails that host the parasitic worms that carry the disease – resulting in a 32% reduction in infections in children, improved access to freshwater and new revenue for the local communities.”    “The best way to bridge single issue silos is through integrated and adaptive decision-making. ‘Nexus approaches’ offer policies and actions that are more coherent and coordinated – moving us towards the transformative change needed to meet our development and sustainability goals,” said Prof. McElwee.    The report states that biodiversity – the richness and variety of all life on Earth – is declining at every level from global to local, and across every region. These ongoing declines in nature, largely as a result of human activity, including climate change, have direct and dire impacts on food security and nutrition, water quality and availability, health and wellbeing outcomes, resilience to climate change and almost all of nature’s other contributions to people.    Building on previous IPBES reports, in particular the 2022 Values Assessment Report and the 2019 Global Assessment Report, which identified the most important direct drivers of biodiversity loss, including land- and sea-use change, unsustainable exploitation, invasive alien species and pollution, the Nexus Report further underscores how indirect socioeconomic drivers, such as increasing waste, overconsumption and population growth, intensify the direct drivers – worsening impacts on all parts of the nexus. The majority of 12 assessed indicators across these indirect drivers – such as GDP, population levels and overall food supply, have all increased or accelerated since 2001.    “Efforts of Governments and other stakeholders have often failed to take into account indirect drivers and their impact on interactions between nexus elements because they remain fragmented, with many institutions working in isolation – often resulting in conflicting objectives, inefficiencies and negative incentives, leading to unintended consequences,” said Prof. Harrison.    The report highlights that more than half of global gross domestic product – more than $50 trillion of annual economic activity around the world – is moderately to highly dependent on nature. “But current decision-making has prioritized short-term financial returns while ignoring costs to nature, and failed to hold actors to account for negative economic pressures on the natural world. It is estimated that the unaccounted-for costs of current approaches to economic activity – reflecting impacts on biodiversity, water, health and climate change, including from food production – are at least $10-25 trillion per year,” said Prof. McElwee.    The existence of such unaccounted-for costs, alongside direct public subsidies to economic activities that have negative impacts on biodiversity (approximately $1.7 trillion per year), enhances private financial incentives to invest in economic activities that cause direct damage to nature (approximately $5.3 trillion per year), in spite of growing evidence of biophysical risks to economic progress and financial stability.    Delaying the action needed to meet policy goals will also increase the costs of delivering it. Delayed action on biodiversity goals, for example, could as much as double costs – also increasing the probability of irreplaceable losses such as species extinctions. Delayed action on climate change adds at least $500 billion per year in additional costs for meeting policy targets.    “Another key message from the report is that the increasingly negative effects of intertwined global crises have very unequal impacts, disproportionately affecting some more than others,” said Prof. Harrison.    More than half of the world’s population is living in areas experiencing the highest impacts from declines in biodiversity, water availability and quality and food security, and increases in health risks and negative effects of climate change. These burdens especially affect developing countries, including small island developing states, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, as well as those in vulnerable situations in higher-income countries. 41% of people live in areas that saw extremely strong declines in biodiversity between 2000 and 2010, 9% in areas that have experienced very high health burdens and 5% in areas with high levels of malnutrition.    Some efforts – such as research and innovation, education and environmental regulations – have been partially successful in improving trends across nexus elements, but the report finds these are unlikely to succeed without addressing interlinkages more fully and tackling indirect drivers like trade and consumption. Decision-making that is more inclusive, with a particular focus on equity, can help ensure those most affected are included in solutions, in addition to larger economic and financial reforms.    If current “business as usual” trends in direct and indirect drivers of change continue, the outcomes will be extremely poor for biodiversity, water quality and human health – with worsening climate change and increasing challenges to meet global policy goals.    A focus on trying to maximize the outcomes for only one part of the nexus in isolation will likely result in negative outcomes for the other nexus elements.    For example, a ‘food first’ approach prioritizes food production with positive benefits on nutritional health, arising from unsustainable intensification of production and increased per capita consumption. This has negative impacts on biodiversity, water and climate change.    An exclusive focus on climate change can result in negative outcomes for biodiversity and food, reflecting competition for land. Weak environmental regulation, made worse by delays, results in worsening impacts for biodiversity, food, human health and climate change.    “Future scenarios do exist that have positive outcomes for people and nature by providing co- benefits across the nexus elements,” said Prof Harrison. “The future scenarios with the widest nexus benefits are those with actions that focus on sustainable production and consumption in combination with conserving and restoring ecosystems, reducing pollution, and mitigating and adapting to climate change.”    http://www.ipbes.net/nexus/media-release http://www.pik-potsdam.de/en/news/latest-news/ipbes-nexus-report-integrated-solutions-to-address-interconnected-global-crises http://www.carbonbrief.org/ipbes-nexus-report-five-takeaways-for-biodiversity-food-water-health-and-climate/ http://www.iied.org/new-biodiversity-reports-wake-call-for-action http://www.ipbes.net/media_release/Values_Assessment_Published http://www.ipbes.net/transformative-change/media-release http://www.ids.ac.uk/news/new-global-report-on-transformative-change-for-biodiversity/ http://www.ipsnews.net/2024/12/transformative-change-will-save-a-planet-in-peril-ipbes/ http://www.fao.org/cfs/cfs-hlpe/insights/news-insights/news-detail/food-security-in-a-changing-planet--aligning-the-rio-conventions-with-the-right-to-food/en
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