Australia hopes it’s successful hosting of the world’s first Global Nature Positive Summit will prop up its sagging climate credibility
These days, the concept of Net Zero is so pervasive that it is the de facto standard for judging climate action. But go back just a decade, and it was a new idea until it was propelled into global prominence via the UN Paris Agreement in 2015.
A parallel concept of Nature Positive – conceived relatively recently, and quite deliberately, to create a biodiversity equivalent to Net Zero – took a big step towards becoming a new global climate and biodiversity standard in mid-October when Australia hosted the world’s first conference on nature-positive solutions aimed at halting and reversing nature loss by 2030 – with the inaugural Global Nature Positive Summit in Sydney.
Where Net Zero began its relentless upward trajectory a decade ago, Nature Positive is following now. The highly ambitious goal of the conference – and a string of follow-up conferences to follow – is to “halt and reverse nature loss through increasing the health, abundance, diversity and resilience of species, populations and ecosystems so that by 2030 nature is visibly and measurably on the path of recovery.”
The drive for a nature-positive economy
The summit brought together 1,000 delegates to talk about nature protection and ways to drive private investment in conservation. It follows earlier discussions at New York Climate Week in September, organized by the Nature Positive Initiative (NPI), a Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors project, to develop a coalition of conservation organizations, institutes and business and finance groups looking to drive alignment around using the term and supporting broader efforts to deliver nature-positive outcomes.
“The climate system is about nature, and nature is about the climate system. Life doesn’t live outside the climate envelope. Life lives within climate envelopes.”
After Sydney, where a “State of Nature Metrics Framework” was launched for consultation, United Nations negotiations will reconvene in Columbia later this month, then at the UN COP29 Global Climate Summit in Azerbaijan, the UNCCD ‘Our Land, Our Future’ conference in Saudi Arabia, COP 29 in Baku Azerbaijan before culminating at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, early next year.
The NPI initiative is at the core of a rapidly emerging global movement challenging the post-Industrial Revolution conventional wisdom that nature is to be used – and abused – to meet the needs of human progress through commodity and resource extraction, waste disposal and the all-but-free use of air and water for commercial purposes. The initiative is also part of an accelerating effort to correct an ongoing historical anomaly at the UN, which has separately pursued Net Zero and Nature Positive agendas.
“The climate system is about nature, and nature is about the climate system. Life doesn’t live outside the climate envelope. Life lives within climate envelopes,” Harvey Locke, one of the architects of Nature Positive, the celebrated Canadian environmentalist, told the 1000 or so summit attendees.
Australia’s Climate Convening test
For host Australia, the summit had a more parochial purpose – the chance to bolster its wavering image as a champion of progressive climate and environmental action. It’s currently battling with Turkey to host the United Nations Climate Conference in 2026, COP31.
It’s a tall order. Climate activists mocked Australia’s choice to host the summit because of its grim record for extinctions, including the world’s worst for mammalian species. In Australia, immigrant predators kill and eat local wildlife in their billions every year. According to the summit’s key sponsor, Australian Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek, feral cats are implicated in two-thirds of native wildlife extinctions.
New South Wales Minister for the Environment Penny Sharpe, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Australian Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek. Source: Tanya Plibersek / Facebook
Its record on fossil fuels is also riddled with contradictions. Despite coming to power on a pro-climate wave of public support, the center-left Labor government recently infuriated climate activists by approving three, long-term coal mine project expansions and allowing logging to resume in a forest stronghold for threatened species, including endangered koalas and the greater glider – Australia’s largest gliding possum.
It also comes less than a year before the Party faces a significant challenge from the conservative opposition seeking to regain power with an aggressive campaign to slow down renewables, prolong coal and gas use and, while highly uneconomical, push the start of nuclear power.
No wonder Locke praised the country, calling it “a courageous act to host something new.” Plibersek conceded in her keynote speech that “we are at the start of the road when it comes to Nature Positive and turning things around.”
Confronting its treatment of Indigenous people
Australia is also struggling with its legacy of the ill-treating of its Indigenous people. Just how engaged Indigenous people and Pacific islanders will be at COP31 will be a critical factor in deciding if Australia and the Pacific will co-host the climate conference in two years.
With so much at stake and controversy swirling around every agenda item, it’s hardly surprising that the government used the conference to plead for patience.
As last week’s conference wound down, observers said it proved to be a successful case study in cross-Pacific collaboration, from Canada to Australia and beyond, and generated positive support in Singapore, Guam, Timor Leste, Fiji, and Niue. Pacific Islands delegate and panel speaker, Fijian traditional chief Sefanaia Nawadra, Director-General of the Secretariat of the Pacific Islands Environment Programme (SPREP), reflected the views of many when he told the opening plenary session, “Indigenous Leadership: Driving Economic Growth and Sustainability,” of his delight at attending, and the change he could see from the host nation, saying: “I was a student here in Australia in the 1980s, and something like this would never have happened.”
Again, welcome to the paradox that is Australia. A few minutes later at the same session, delegates heard that when it comes to crucial financial self-determination and economic empowerment for Indigenous peoples, Australia still lags at least three decades behind the leading nation, Canada. And almost a year ago, voters failed to pass a highly contentious and divisive referendum, rejecting a constitutional change to give Indigenous Australians a formal voice in Parliament – a pivotal setback for efforts of reconciliation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples and their often-violent, colonial-era dispossession from their land.
Patience please
With so much at stake and controversy swirling around every agenda item, it’s hardly surprising that the government used the conference to plead for patience.
“To those who might demand perfection and jump on anyone who falls short while they are learning and trying – I urge you to listen, talk and persuade instead. Make the case. Win people over, don’t alienate them,” said Minister Plibersek.
Nature factored into economic and business decisions
Parochial politics aside, the conference was a critical step towards developing – and acting on – a global consensus to harness markets to establish a realistic framework to accelerate the flow of capital into nature-positive initiatives.
To do this, negotiators are in deep discussions about what is known as the “The State of Nature Metrics Framework,” a proposal to develop universal and case-specific metrics, at both the species and ecosystem levels, in order to measure the value of “living nature” across land, freshwater and sea.
The idea originated at the historic UN Biodiversity Convention in Canada in 2022, known in the arcane world of UN initiatives as the “Kumming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.” While humanity has developed great expertise at measuring its harm to nature, as one panelist asserted, there’s a glaring, gaping chasm when it comes to tracking any positive improvements, according to UN experts.
While humanity has developed great expertise at measuring its harm to nature, as one panelist asserted, there’s a glaring, gaping chasm when it comes to tracking any positive improvements.
What is next?
The conference ended with no official communique. It wasn’t that kind of event, but rather about a rich dialogue and sharing of ideas, mercifully free of the highly formal text-drafting tensions of a traditional UN COP event.
But Australia’s Plibersek laid out a call to action that, if acted on, would have as big an impact on the Earth’s future as Net Zero. She urged action on four obvious but long-ignored solutions to the biodiversity crisis.
- Nature needs to be factored into economic and business decisions. To make good decisions, we must understand, measure, and report on our economic dependence on nature, our impacts on nature, and the value of ecosystem services that our communities and economies rely on.
- Clear and consistent metrics are essential. Environmental metrics used only to discuss impacts on nature and the condition of natural assets should be standardized wherever possible to speak the same language when we report on nature.
- Indigenous leadership is critical to sustainability. Traditional knowledge plays a vital role in caring for nature. Indigenous leaders have significant opportunities to influence economic outcomes and have a seat at the table. They should have those opportunities to call the shots on nature.
- Nature Positive and Net Zero objectives must work together. They should go hand in hand because nature-based solutions should be used to achieve our environmental and climate goals.
It sounds so obvious. And for the smart investor, it’s also an actionable tip by a senior government official on how to get ahead of trends that will shape global capital markets for years to come. On to the next international forum.
