Introduction

Following years of negotiations, including delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Kunming-Montreal Biodiversity Framework (GBF) was adopted at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP15) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in December 2022 in Montreal, Canada. The GBF sets out an ambitious pathway to reach the global vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050. Yet the framework’s implementation and effect are dependent on national and regional execution with civil society organisations instrumental in ensuring this.

Civil society organisations are drivers of ambition in international agreements and instil accountability for governments to follow up on their commitments. They are also key actors in the implementation of the agreements themselves. “Joint Nordic Effort for Biodiversity” is a collaborative project led by the Norwegian Forum for Development and Environment (ForUM), alongside CONCORD Sweden and The Danish 92 Group - Forum for Sustainable Development. The project is funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers and the Nordic Working Group for Biodiversity (NBM).

The purpose of the project is to catalyse biodiversity action, advance the implementation of the GBF within the Nordic region and to strengthen Nordic civil society’s impact on the negotiations in the CBD, including Nordic governments’ positions.

By harnessing the expertise of Nordic CSOs across various thematic areas, we have developed policy recommendations on GBF implementation to the Nordic governments, gathered in this publication.

The policy recommendations should be considered as a whole. Several targets reflect the recommendations, but we have made an effort to avoid repetition. Some issues are cross cutting or do not belong under one specific target, such as the terminology for Indigenous Peoples or the role of citizens in the framework and implementation efforts.

The publication is the result of a wide range of civil society organisations with varying expertise providing input across focus areas, perspectives and political views. Hence, the policy recommendations in this publication are not the primary positions and prioritised messages of all of the organisations that have contributed or are supporting the publication but rather a compilation of proposals. The proposals have been adjusted to fit the Nordic context, and many of the organisations will have more specific suggestions for their own governments. In this context, the proposals for national implementation are recommendations for the implementation in the Nordic countries, with the preconditions that entails. Hence, they should not be read as general recommendations for all national action plans.

The rights of Indigenous Peoples are essential for the rights-based implementation of the GBF. Yet there are still challenges with how the GBF and the Convention on Biodiversity refer to Indigenous Peoples. In the document, we will alternate between using the terms Indigenous Peoples and local communities or Indigenous Peoples, depending on the context, although the GBF uses the term ‘indigenous peoples and local communities’ with all lower-case letters. This is to align our terminology with the request from the three UN special mechanisms dedicated to Indigenous Peoples to seize the use of the term ‘indigenous peoples and local communities’, while at the same time avoiding confusion as we are referring to the text of the Convention on Biodiversity or the GBF.

The GBF highlights the role played by citizens to achieve the global vision and “Invites Parties and relevant organizations to support community-based monitoring and information systems and citizen science and their contributions to the implementation of the monitoring framework” for the GBF. Hence, we propose that Nordic governments prepare national strategies for involving citizens in nature conservation and natural resource management i.e. through community-based monitoring and citizen science. Responsibility still lies with governmental institutions, but citizen involvement, for example via community-based monitoring and citizen science, is critical as the parties to the GBF agreed that the GBF is “a framework for all – for the whole of government and the whole of society. Its success requires political will and recognition at the highest level of government and relies on action and cooperation by all levels of government and all actors of society”. An assessment of the indicators for the GBF shows that half of the indicators can involve citizens in data collection or interpretation.

Greater involvement of citizens in the GBF would increase engagement, harness knowledge from those living close to nature, facilitate decision making at local to national levels by filling data gaps, and increase implementation of the GBF to improve prospects for biodiversity.