This December, environmental ministers and representatives from nearly 200 countries came together at the COP15 biodiversity summit in Montreal, Canada to agree on a new set of goals to guide global action through 2030 to halt and reverse nature loss.

The result was the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), a historic package of measures critical in ensuring the long-term creation and preservation of biodiversity and ecosystems. Canada’s environment minister and host of COP15, Steven Guilbeault, compared the final agreement to the UN’s Paris agreement, which requires countries to keep global temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celsius.

The deal includes a number of core global targets for 2030:

• Countries agreed to restore and conserve at least 30% of nature by 2030 - including the world’s lands, inland waters, coastal areas and oceans. The text emphasizes the need for effective conservation management to ensure that wetlands, rainforests, grasslands, and coral reefs are properly protected, while respecting indigenous and traditional territories in the expansion of new protected areas.
• Rich nations have committed to paying an estimated $30 billion a year by 2030 to developing nations to help them fund biodiversity and nature recovery efforts. In total, countries pledged $200bn a year (£164bn) of domestic and international biodiversity-related funding by 2030, from public and private sources.
• Countries committed to the progressive phasing out of subsidies that harm biodiversity, while scaling up positive incentives for biodiversity’s conservation and sustainable use.
• Reduce by half both excess nutrients and the overall risk posed by pesticides and highly hazardous chemicals.
• Reduce global food waste by half.
• Require large companies and financial institutions to monitor, assess, and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies and impacts on biodiversity through their operations, supply and value chains and portfolios.

Lily Billings, Group Sustainability & ESG Lead, comments: "These targets couldn’t have come at a better time. They absolutely solidify what the TNFD is pushing forward to achieve whilst holding international governments to account. It is a really exciting time to be part of the conversation around nature, from conserving what we have, to recovering what has been lost – we all have a part to play and it is imperative that businesses get behind these global targets. 2023 will no doubt be a year of mobilising action cross-sector, all in the name of tackling the nature crisis, and I’m glad that Foresight has started our journey to drive nature recovery through collaborative partnerships.”

Click here to learn how we're aligning with these targets through our Nature Recovery Ambition Statement.