Action for biodiversity: key takeaways from the Shaping a Biodiversity-Proof Future 2024 event

Water, climate, and biodiversity are the foundations of life on Earth. Despite their vital functions, these elements face severe pressures, threatening food, health, safety and economies. To address this, Partners for Water and the IUCN hosted “Shaping a Biodiversity-Proof Future” on 1 October 2024 at Omniversum Museon, in The Hague. This event united the international water, food and nature sectors to develop actionable solutions. Explore the next steps for a biodiversity proof future below.

“Biodiversity and ecosystem services form a strong foundation that underpins all the sectors present today. It’s not a ‘nice to have’; it’s at the core,” explained Heleen van den Hombergh from the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature). Together with co-organizer Liliane Geerling from Partners for Water and moderator Caroline van Leenders from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature, she opened the Biodiversity event. Amid the museum’s captivating photos of wild cats, eagles and rhinos, 90 dedicated water, food and biodiversity professionals listened attentively as van Leenders explained that the event is designed not just to inspire but to catalyse action to integrate biodiversity in their work and mainstream it internationally.

Working towards a biodiversity proof future

The majority of the day was dedicated to collaborative workshops in small groups. Participants discussed challenges, identified action points, and equipped each other with the new insights needed to work towards a biodiversity-proof future. Geerling added, “The insights resulting from today’s discussions we will bring to the Sixteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 16) in Cali, Colombia this October.”

Five themes that impact biodiversity were explored during the day: regenerative agriculture, water related infrastructure, greening finance, transformative change, and biocultural landscapes, including ancestral knowledge in landscape-based approaches. The main takeaways are presented below.

Main takeaways for mainstreaming biodiversity

An overarching insight from the sessions was the interconnectedness of biodiversity and climate change. Destroying and degrading ecosystems releases more CO2 emissions than burning fossil fuels. Conversely, the consequences of burning fossil fuels—such as rising global temperatures, increased wildfires, and ocean acidification—threaten habitats and wildlife.

Each session resulted in various outcomes, with two insights recurring across all sessions:

• Collective action: A biodiversity-friendly future requires unified efforts from all stakeholders, including businesses, NGOs, knowledge institutions and governments.
• Localized approach: Working with local people and partners is crucial. Incorporating not only their needs but also their knowledge is essential for achieving positive biodiversity impact.

These recurring outcomes underscore the complexity of biodiversity challenges and the need for integrated, collaborative solutions. To learn more about these subject-specific insights, please continue reading below.

Regenerative agriculture and biodiversity

A sustainable food system should provide sufficient, affordable, and healthy food for everyone, fairly produced and within the Earth’s ecological limits. The current system is far from achieving this goal, but regenerative agriculture can play a crucial role in making food systems more sustainable.

During this session, a collective brainstorm was held. It resulted in acknowledging various challenges and identifying many potential solutions to address these challenges which you can find in illustration 1.

“How we produce our food is probably one of the biggest challenges of the decade and will determine the biodiversity status for the future.” – Marieke Harteveld, Lead agri-food transition at the Netherlands Enterprise Agency

Additionally, useful practices for implementing regenerative agroforestry in a landscape setting were discussed.

Takeaways

• Agroforestry practices, such as implementing edible hedges, can benefit both nature and farmers by addressing soil erosion, water scarcity, reduced biodiversity, climate change and economic vulnerability.
• Understanding community needs and adopting a bottom-up approach is crucial for the successful implementation and adoption of agroforestry practices.
• Patience and long-term thinking are required, as income and returns from agroforestry may come later. De-risking smallholder investments through conservation agreements, collateral, and spreading risk across farmers can help attract investment partners.

Water infrastructure, climate resilience & biodiversity

People often claim that biodiversity is too complex to integrate into water-related infrastructures, like dikes, dams, sluices, and storm-surge barriers, but, ensure that biodiversity is prioritized from the starting point and monitored at the start as well as after implementation, it is achievable. This session encouraged participants to exchange ideas on how to integrate biodiversity into infrastructure projects and explored the key challenges and innovations when monitoring biodiversity in these types of infrastructures.

Takeaways

• Both time constraints and climate change must be considered when planning for water related infrastructures. Infrastructure projects often have short timelines, while restoring or preferably enhancing biodiversity requires long-term thinking.
• Data-driven design is crucial for monitoring biodiversity and creating biodiverse oceans and climate-resilient coastlines and infrastructure, and incorporating data from indigenous communities and historical environmental information should be standard practice.
• Interdisciplinary collaboration is necessary to create and maintain impactful, climate resilient water related infrastructures, with an emphasis on including ecologists in decision-making processes.

Greening finance & biodiversity

Ecosystem services are becoming increasingly relevant in the investment world. Of the three types—regulating, provisioning, and cultural ecosystem services —provisioning services are often assigned a higher monetary value, while regulating services are often undervalued despite their importance to human wellbeing. This session explored how recognizing the true value of ecosystem services leads to better investment decisions, what financing nature-positive initiatives means, and why it is needed.

“It is not just about funding restoration projects; we need to fundamentally change business and finance.” –  Nicolas Poolen, Green Finance Adviser, WWF

Takeaways

• Provisioning ecosystem services are often easier to invest in than regulating ecosystem services due to their direct market value, but if we want to conserve nature, we need to recognize the true value of regulating ecosystem services.
• Nature’s value appreciates over decades and the localized nature of ecosystem services necessitates targeted investment strategies at the landscape level. That’s why investment strategies for nature require alignment with ecological timescales and local contexts.
• There is a shortage of transition plans rather than a shortage of capital for nature positive investments. This presents a clear opportunity to integrate nature into strategies, aiming to deliver both net zero and nature-positive outcomes for the corporate and financial sectors.

Did you know that the Ecosystem Services Valuation Database (ESVD) can be used as a tool for valuing ecosystem services? Discover more about ESVD.

Transformative change and biodiversity

Our food systems undeniably require change, but how can we ensure this change is transformative? This session encouraged participants to explore both general and specific transformative practices in food value chains, alongside strategies for overcoming barriers. The key insights from this discussion provided substantial food for thought and action.

Takeaways

• An important aspect for transformative change is to understand that worldviews and knowledge systems underpin what we value in nature and biodiversity and that there are multiple value perspectives, like nature for nature, nature as culture, and nature for society.
• There should be a fundamental shift in value chain strategy: competition should no longer be solely based on price, quality and availability, but should also incorporate water usage and biodiversity considerations.
• Transition management is complex due to the number of stakeholders involved and their potentially conflicting interests. Every stakeholder group, from government, businesses and NGOs to financial institutions, has a role in the transition process, emphasizing the importance of coordination and timing.

Indigenous knowledge & biocultural landscapes

Did everything used to be better? We all know that’s not always true. However, many ancient practices that we’ve set aside did a better job of respecting nature and biodiversity. A wealth of this knowledge, both ancient and contemporary, is still preserved and practiced by indigenous cultures all around the world. This session on biocultural landscapes discussed how we can incorporate this wisdom, focusing on ancestral knowledge and landscape-based approaches for sustainable development.

Takeaways:

• Reviving biocultural landscapes requires considering the inherent logic of the landscape as a foundation and landscape values.  This includes leveraging ethnobotanical knowledge and ecological wisdom and practices from local indigenous cultures.
• Landscape-based approaches are context-specific; scaling up requires being alert to opportunities and cultivating local partnerships.
• Although funding is often siloed, landscape-based approaches demand a holistic perspective, emphasizing co-creation and regeneration.

Nature will bounce back

It is clear that biodiversity extends far beyond environmental benefits and ecosystem health. It forms the foundation of our lives and the resources we depend on. Addressing its decline is of the essence. Wouter Ubbink, former UN Youth Representative on Biodiversity and Food, ended the day with a pledge that left participants with food for thought.

“Water and nature should not be tamed but should be given space instead. Space is where the battle for nature will be fought,” said Ubbink compellingly. In his view, green growth is a myth. So, we need to halt over-exploitation, overproduction and overconsumption. Nature should be embraced and harnessed, not controlled and oppressed. Ubbink: “If we leave it alone nature will bounce back.”

Uniting for biodiversity: a call for collective action

This event marks just one step towards a more sustainable and resilient future for both humanity and nature. The insights from these workshops will be carried forward, as we will bring them to the Biodiversity COP16 in Cali, Colombia in October and continue today’s efforts during sessions hosted at the Netherlands pavilion. You can find more details in our full programme here.

Building on this momentum, our new podcast series, Waterproof, will launch on 21 November. It will explore biodiversity and other crucial water themes, including salinisation, the Build-Neglect-Rebuild cycle, locally led development, greening finance and Water-Biodiversity-Food. The series kicks off with one of the crucial elements in creating positive biodiversity impact: Nature-based Solutions. Click here to stay tuned and be notified when the series launches.

Partners for Water and IUCN urge participants and other water professionals to start mainstreaming biodiversity in all their processes and projects and to work together towards a world where biodiversity thrives.