Imma Perfetto
Cosmos science journalist
Last week in Sydney, Australia hosted the inaugural Global Nature Positive Summit. It brought together government, corporate sectors, research and environmental organisations and Indigenous Peoples to “accelerate collective action to drive investment in nature and strengthen activities to protect and repair our environment”.
But what does Nature Positive mean and did the summit actually do what it set out to achieve? Cosmos spoke to members of Biodiversity Council Australia for their perspective.
What is “Nature Positive”?
Alongside a failure to mitigate climate change and climate change adaptation, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2023 ranks biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as some of the most severe risks humanity faces over the next decade.
The term “Nature Positive” emerged in 2019 and has since gained recognition as a global goal to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030 against a 2020 baseline and achieve full recovery by 2050.
The concept behind Nature Positive, says Martine Maron, a professor of environmental management at the University of Queensland, is the idea that humanity relies very closely on nature for the air we breathe, for the food we eat, the quality of our water, for regulating our climate and even local weather, and more.
“These are all the ways in which we, as part of nature, are also intrinsically dependent on it,” she says.
At the same time, however, humans are degrading nature’s ability to deliver on those services. Australia, for example, is a deforestation hotspot, has lost 100 endemic species to extinction since European colonisation, and is the world leader in mammal loss.
“Nature Positive is taking it a step further than just saying the rate at which nature is declining is unsustainable,” says Maron.
“It’s recognising that we need to not just slow the rate of decline, indeed, not just halt the decline of nature, but to turn it around so we’re actually regenerating and improving the ability of nature to deliver all of these ecosystem services.”
The Global Nature Positive Summit aimed to explore effective ways to realise global commitments under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, sometimes called the “Paris Agreement for Nature”.
It was signed in December 2022 at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) by 196 countries, including Australia.
So, did the summit do what it set out to achieve?
Rachel Morgain, deputy director of the Melbourne Biodiversity Institute at Melbourne University, says that it was a mixed experience.
“I think the positives were over 1,000 delegates coming together from all sorts of sectors,” Morgain says.
“There was a very good showing from business and finance at the summit, as well as from people who work in land management, Indigenous land and sea managers, and conservation and research.
“It was a great chance to meet and connect with some fantastic people, or reconnect, and start to plan how we can bring forward practical strategies and start to implement change to achieve nature positive goals.
“Part of the challenge of the summit was that we didn’t see that leadership coming from government, which was perhaps not surprising but nevertheless was disappointing and lent a kind of slightly frustrating air to the whole thing.”
Maron agrees.
“The problem is, of course, these things can be real talkfests, and I think that’s what this was,” says Maron.
“It wasn’t used as an opportunity for the Australian government to announce the sorts of significant reforms or investments that we need to achieve Nature Positive.
“It’s great to embrace it as a concept, but we need to see action, otherwise this term is going to turn into … just another has-been buzzword.”
The ingredients of what we need to do to achieve this are not new, radical ideas.
“In fact, it’s been reflected in things like the Samuel review of the EPBC Act and the current government’s high-level response to that review, which was called the Nature Positive Plan,” Maron says.
This plan committed to reforming environmental law, setting up a “Nature Repair Market” and establishing a national Environment Protection Agency. Of those, the Nature Repair Market was legislated in December, but the EPA appears stalled in the Senate and the wider reforms have not even been introduced to parliament.
“Seeing the implementation, that’s what’s missing,” says Maron.
In July, the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, of which Maron is a member, published the Blueprint to Repair Australia’s Landscapes, which estimates it would take $7.3 billion per year over a 30-year action plan to “repair much of Australia’s degraded landscapes and set Australia on a nature positive trajectory”.
Barry Hunter, chief executive officer of the North Australian Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA), commends the Australian Government for its engagement of First Nations people for the summit, but he echoes that government cannot walk away from the responsibility of adequate funding.
“For me, it’s simple. What needs to be supported, from our point of view, are the organisations that we work with on the ground who are out doing work every day,” says Hunter.
“I’m talking about the Indigenous land and sea rangers. I’m talking about Indigenous people who are engaged in some form of … regeneration work, or repair work on their Country,” he says.
Indigenous peoples and communities have ownership, management and co-management, or other special rights over 57% of Australia’s land and forest. But Hunter says that land and sea managers are largely underfunded and underequipped to undertake the work on the scale that it is needed.
“A lot of those groups have those aspirations and … First Nations obligation to be able to get out and look after Country, but that’s not reflecting within the resources and resource allocation.”
