This summary is provided by Sanjana Kumari, ESG Associate and Charlotte Dyvik Henke, ESG Consultant.
Day 10 highlighted what is now commonly acknowledged: nature loss and climate change are inherently linked and climate solutions must promote nature positivity to be sustainable.
Razan Al Mubarak, the UN Climate Change High-Level Champion for COP28, stressed the integral role of protecting and restoring nature, land, and the ocean in fulfilling the Paris Agreement's goals. Amongst the highlights:
- Governments have pledged financing for nature through various initiatives, with large financial commitments on food and land use, towards eliminating deforestation, supporting landscape restoration and ocean, forest, and mangrove protection.
- 17 countries released a joint statement on the use of sustainable wood in construction.
- 21 countries endorsed the Mangrove Breakthroughs, which aim to restore and protect 100% of the 15 million hectares of mangroves that remain globally and halt mangrove destruction by 2030.
- The Ocean Breakthroughs and Dubai Ocean Declaration called for greater recognition of the importance of oceans in climate change and aims to bring more collaboration for ocean solutions, with particular focus on improving monitoring and observing capabilities.
- The Forest Carbon Results and Credits Roadmap was launched exploring the potential of forest carbon markets to scale payments for climate and environmental services. This roadmap complements the newly released carbon credit framework that aims to bring greater integrity and additionality to the voluntary carbon market.
The UN Environment Programme released a State of Finance for Nature Report, highlighting the $7 trillion of public and private finance that each year supports activities directly harming nature. This is 30 times the amount spent on nature-based solutions annually. The private sector accounts for $5 billion of this amount, primarily from construction, electric utilities, real estate, oil and gas, food, and tobacco. Meanwhile, private sector investment in nature-based solutions is 140 times lower at only $35 million.
Making progress on nature will involve not only investing in nature solutions, but more importantly, “greening” the $7 trillion by engaging with entities and portfolio companies across their value chains to mitigate their adverse impacts on nature.
We join the urgent call to move beyond silos when considering solutions to the interconnected issues of nature loss, land use change, and climate change. The need for greater capacity-building, awareness of nature-related impacts and related risks is becoming increasingly clear to enable more informed decision-making.
The ocean and freshwater initiatives provide key steps in directing attention further beyond land-based solutions toward ocean and water ecosystems that provide key climate solutions, but that are yet underexplored.
Today’s events were promising and brought about frameworks for the collaboration needed for nature-based solution implementation. The involvement of indigenous groups is crucial to this implementation, as they currently act as stewards for 80% of the Earth’s biodiversity. However, as we called out in one of our previous COP assessments, there are only 316 representatives of indigenous groups at this year’s COP, much fewer than the 2456 oil and gas lobbyists registered.
There is a pressing need to embrace the principle of inclusion in the implementation of solutions, establishing the norm that those directly affected are consistently and actively involved.
