The Global Nature Positive Summit

I was fortunate last week to be among one of 1000 invited guests to the world’s first Global Nature Positive Summit. The Summit, organised by Environment and Water Minister, Tanya Plibersek’s office, and co-hosted by the Australian Federal and New South Wales State governments.

The Global Nature Positive Summit was the first global dialogue aimed at exploring and initiating effective ways to realise global commitments under the December 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework formally sounded alarm at the overwhelming evidence for continued loss of biodiversity, deteriorating worldwide at rates unprecedented in human history; the threat that this poses to nature and human well-being; and the urgent need for action to bring about a transformation in our societies’ relationship with biodiversity by 2030.

The goals of the Global Nature Positive Summit were perfectly aligned with the ethos of Ecological Engineering, which involves the design, construction and management of sustainable ecosystems that integrate human society with the natural environment for the benefit of both.

The Summit brought together leaders from government, corporate sectors, research and environmental organisations and Indigenous Peoples to drive collective action for investment in protection, repair and regeneration of nature and the invaluable ecosystem that supports society and life on earth.

Importantly, many presentations at the Summit focussed on aligning the language of finance and environment, with examples of how our economic system, that has historically contributed to the decline of nature, can be used to mobilise the capital needed protect and repair it for the benefit of all.

For me, this was a re-awakening to one of the key economic principles that we tend to overlook in daily life. We are well aware that the four factors of production are Land, Labour, Capital and Entrepreneurship, however, in our modern world, we tend to forget that land refers to all naturally occurring resources. This includes everything, from geographic land and minerals, to healthy soils, clean air, healthy waterways, natural pollinators and genetic diversity. It should be self-evident that the economic “land” is nature, and deterioration of nature and biodiversity is directly linked to deterioration in the capital of our economy, society and the environment.

Summit presentations recognised that we can’t rely on government grants. Figures were quoted like $7 billion a year, or just 0.3% of GDP, is needed to repair nature in Australia over the next 30 years. However, current government spending is approximately 0.01% of GDP, while subsidies and other incentives that drive the destruction of nature exceed $26 billion per year. A different model is required.

A key takeaway for me was the quote “its hard to the green when you are in the red”. This epitomises the need to find common language between finance and the environment, and the need for more business models that find synergy between nature and the economy, turning what we commonly see as risk into value, rather than seeing one as a trade off against the other. It also fits well with the question of the venerable Jane Goodall, who asked the question, “If Mother Nature was in the boardroom, what would she say?”. A presentation by Kate Raworth, the originator of doughnut economics, provided models and examples to achieve this aim, demonstrating a pathway to internalise the externalities our economy has convenient sought to ignore, orient corporations and to mobilise the capital required to recognise the real value of nature.

Other takeaways from the Summit included:
• Climate and nature are interrelated. There are synergies fighting climate and nature loss;
• We are subsiding nature destruction more than protecting it;
• Nature positive needs multi-sector collaboration;
• We are using 1.6x earths resources at current rate of consumption
• We need to understand that difference between value of the ecosystem and the price we put on it;
• Climate change targets are projected to have a $38 trillion impact by 2050;
• $577 billion of crop production is at risk due to loss of insect and animal pollinators
• In 1991, Robert Solow (1991) defined sustainability as “an obligation to conduct ourselves so that we leave to the future the option or the capacity to be as well off as we are. We could be the first generation to not meet this obligation. We need to be better ancestors.

In 2021, I led a team of 20 environmental scientist and practitioners from around to globe on the need for education in ecological engineering. Perhaps an element missing from the Summit was the need to increase level of literacy and education in the next generation. If we are to realise the potential of nature-based solutions to deliver a nature positive future, we need to train a multidisciplinary cohort of the next generation in systems thinking on the scale at which nature operates, to deliver reliable, performance based and financially environmentally and socially sustainable action.