Rapid biodiversity loss is one of the most pressing issues of our time. In response, actions and agreements have been made to halt this process and restore disturbed ecosystems. This project focused on one such agreement, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework 2022 (GBF), an international agreement signed by 196 countries including all the Nordic countries. Now the task is to move from agreement, to implementation, and to policy. This challenge requires careful science-based policy grounded in the knowledge of local ecosystems and biodiversity challenges, as well as transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration.
The Nordic Biodiversity Framework (NBF), a network of scientists and policymakers, is an effort to develop such a collaboration. The cultural, political, and historical similarities between the Nordic countries provide good grounds for Nordic cooperation on the protection of nature and biodiversity. On the other hand, there are also differences between the countries which are highly relevant, such as elements of political and societal culture, climate, and ecosystems. It is not only the common features but also the differences that provide the necessary diversity to create synergy to understand relevant issues and identify leading practices. The project was funded in 2024 by the Nordic Working Group for Biodiversity (NBM) under the Nordic Council of Ministers.
The Nordic Biodiversity Framework (NBF) is a Nordic collaboration platform between Iceland, Finland, and Denmark. The NBF project was initiated by Biodice, the Icelandic partner, and hosted by the Icelandic Museum of Natural History involving close collaboration with the University of Jyväskylä in Finland and the Center for Macroecology, Evolution, and Climate (CMEC) at Globe Institute, University of Copenhagen in Denmark. The project’s partners are all dedicated to work on biodiversity and have been involved in several supportive projects.
The NBF aimed to lay the foundation for a Nordic synergy by compiling existing knowledge about biodiversity issues and practices and by examining the status of GBF implementation, specifically Targets 1–8 (Table 1) in each of the member countries, Iceland, Finland, and Denmark. Workshops and discussions within the network in 2024 resulted in valuable connections, opportunities to learn from each other, the identification of leading practices, and preliminary comparisons between countries in terms of the status of biodiversity implementation. The compilation of existing knowledge about biodiversity issues in each country is presented below along with examples of a leading practice and the implementation of one GBF target in the respective country.