Saving Nature, Again
What is the Kunming-Montreal Framework?
This week, the world has been noisy as the Trump administration takes office in the US. But that’s a boring story told over and over again. So, instead of focusing on the bad, let’s talk about the biodiversity legislation that many (196) countries, including the US, the EU, and the UK ratified.
Go. Go. Go.
Nature Matters
In 2022 there was a watershed when it came to protecting nature. It happened at COP15 and an international agreement involving 196 countries was created. The agreement, named for cities in China and Canada, was the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. It was a starting point (three years ago) for thinking about climate resilience through the lens of biodiversity.
Why was this a breakthrough?
It’s about life creating the conditions for life. Biodiversity is more interesting as a metric than carbon because it allows weird non-linearities to emerge as life starts to recolonize areas and nature comes back. Think of it like this — 400 beavers can do the work of an army of tractors and chainsaws. They slow down waterways, they prune the forests and if you get into the data, areas with beavers have fewer wildfires, and that’s from California. It’s been in the news of late.
For us, it was about changing the narrative. Metrics are how we orientate ourselves in the world. Carbon isn’t a good fit for what’s needed. Biodiversity is better, but funding and financing so that it can get momentum is what’s required.
Key Takeaways of Kunming-Montreal
The biggest takeaway was the 30 under 30 aspect of the agreement (full version here). Essentially, it’s about protection for 30% of the world's nature (land and water) by 2030. It’s funny that 30 under 30 in Google gives you Forbes. We don’t have our priorities straight anymore. What does this mean?
Restoration of degraded landscapes.
Protection of coastal and wetland areas.
Protection of old-growth forests.
Regeneration of watersheds.
And money lots of money flowing into nature finance (or so we thought?).
The bottleneck for environmentalism has always been finance. There is more money in fossil fuels compared to nature restoration and because we like to own, there is a sense that nature has to be on the balance sheet once more.
Let’s talk about finance, baby.
The “F”—word has always been the issue hasn’t it? Bloomberg estimates that the gap between funding needed and current funding is around $942M per year. Let’s call it a trillion. Who has that under their mattress? And why would they put it into nature?
In terms of global output, a $1T isn’t a big amount ~ it’s about 1% of GDP annually in 2024 numbers. To put it into perspective, most politicians move more than 1% a year of their national budgets between programs. The crypto market has inflated by more than $1T in the last few months based on speculative activity. And the total amount spent to bailout banks in 2008/9 was around $498BN in the US alone or about 3.5% of the US GDP in 2009 money (from a credible research source here). The money is there — we just have to get out of our own way, and perhaps be creative about how money moves and where it moves.
Beyond Money: Rewilding and Regenerative Farming
Beyond the monetary aspects of Kunming-Montreal, several other fascinating points arise. If we start moving out of the carbon frame and thinking about whole systems, emphasizing biodiversity starts to support resilience narratives that are emerging today: These are topics like rewilding (landscape restoration with nature-based systems) and regenerative farming (no-till, no fertilizer, and heirloom seeds). These topics are interesting, and they work in practice — one just has to be patient. But can the economy afford patience? What’s the alternative? Who has to push?
People who study risk are also deeply interested in resilience (see Andrew Zolli’s book Resilience for an eye-opening read), and it’s precisely these old-school farming and restoration methods that support increases in systemic resilience. This is what Kunming—Montreal was about: Finding an answer to the question of increasing our global, collective resilience.
This isn’t very capitalist you could say — then perhaps let’s imagine a post-capitalist world where our actions are orchestrated by the demon in the machine. What have we got to lose? Everything and nothing?
Reach out if you’d like to know more about what we’re doing at Earthstream.
Thanks for reading!
Push the buttons! Have a great weekend.