Sociologies of climate change are not enough. Putting the global biodiversity crisis on the sociological agenda

In December 2022, the 15^th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity adopted what was described in the official press release as a ‘historic package of measures deemed critical to addressing the dangerous loss of biodiversity and restoring natural ecosystems’ (CBD 2022). These included protection of at least 30% of the world’s lands, inland waters, coastal areas, and oceans by 2030 (thereby endorsing the ‘global deal for nature’ or 30 × 30 initiative proposed by Dinerstein et al. 2019) along with restoration complete or under way on at least 30% of degraded terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems and a suite of other goals and targets. I will outline these in a little more detail below. However, my aim in this essay is not to provide a comprehensive overview of the agreed Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework but to consider its implications for sociology and cognate social sciences – to ask how signing of this ‘landmark agreement’ might inform research agendas, and the practical contribution of sociology to more just and sustainable futures.

Logic, goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework

The Kunming-Montreal Framework envisages a world living in harmony with nature. Its long-term goals are, by 2050, to ensure that: (A) the area, integrity, connectivity and resilience of natural ecosystems increase while genetic diversity is maintained and extinction risks are reduced; (B) the ecosystem functions and services provided by biodiversity are valued, maintained and enhanced for the benefit of present and future generations; (C) monetary and non-monetary benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources are shared fairly and equitably; and (D) the means of implementation for the Framework, including financial resources, capacity building, technical and scientific cooperation and technology transfer, are secured.

The Framework’s mission from 2022 to 2030 is:

To take urgent action to halt and reverse biodiversity loss to put nature on a path to recovery for the benefit of people and planet by conserving and sustainably using biodiversity, and ensuring the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the use of genetic resources, while providing the necessary means of implementation.¹

Biodiversity and the ecosystem services it provides are deteriorating at rates unprecedented in human history – deterioration driven, principally, by land and sea use change, overexploitation of biodiversity resources, climate change, pollution, and invasive alien species (IPBES 2019). The Kunming-Montreal Framework thus aims to transform societies’ relationship with biodiversity and to galvanize ‘urgent and transformative action’ by government and non-government actors to reverse biodiversity loss. At the same time, the framework respects national sovereignty, human rights, the contributions and rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, the diversity of concepts and values people bring to understanding and managing biodiversity, the importance of gender equality, socioeconomic development, and inter-generational equity, and so on. Implementation is to be based on an ecosystem approach underpinned by science, traditional knowledge, innovation, education, and finance.

The ‘23 action-oriented global targets’ for 2030 embedded in the Framework focus on reducing threats to biodiversity (Targets 1–8), meeting people’s needs through sustainable use and benefit-sharing (Targets 9–13), and tools and solutions for implementation and mainstreaming (Targets 14–23). These address the expansion of protected areas and ecosystem restoration efforts, or 30 × 30 targets, mentioned above, as well as improvements in planning, management, biosecurity, pollution abatement, information, resourcing, capacity-building, benefit-sharing, and governance. Targets also address climate change, gender inclusivity, and justice for indigenous and local communities.

What’s in the Kunming-Montreal Framework for sociologists?

There is a great deal in the Kunming-Montreal Framework that ought to be of interest to sociologists. While I have no intention of offering a comprehensive or definitive list of issues raised by the Framework here, I will discuss four that that strike me as particularly important, including: recognition of indigenous peoples’ rights, problematizing the ontological politics of mainstream conservation paradigms,² the implicit endorsement of assisted ecosystem adaptation, and the explicit endorsement of market-based governance.

Since its proposal in 2019, the 30 × 30 agenda for expanding protected areas has attracted criticism for giving inadequate consideration to the rights of indigenous peoples, their positive contributions to biodiversity stewardship, and the risk of negative social and environmental outcomes arising from fresh waves of dispossession in the name of conservation.³ While Dinerstein et al. (2019) argue that a ‘global deal for nature’ can assist indigenous peoples secure tenure rights and maintain traditional resource uses (see also Dinerstein et al. 2020), many indigenous peoples’ organizations remain unconvinced that the relevant Kunming-Montreal Framework targets provide adequate protection against ‘fortress conservation’ and land grabbing.⁴

This is not just about access to land and waters or the right to inclusion in decision-making. It is about the ontological and epistemic authority of indigenous peoples to define the meaning and measure of biodiversity. It is about recognition of the dynamic interplay of biological, cultural, and linguistic diversity (Maffi 2005) and allowing for the full expression of First Nations’ sovereignty (Gavin et al. 2015). The challenge to dispossession is a challenge to conservation paradigms that limit the expression of indigenous cultures, knowledge, and lifeways to those deemed ‘traditional’ and consistent with externally defined conservation goals⁵ as much as it is to those which exclude people altogether (Fletcher et al. 2021). While the ontological politics of conservation to which this speaks are tacitly acknowledged in the respect professed by the Kunming-Montreal Framework for multiple conceptions of nature there is rather less accommodation of multiplicity in its specific goals and targets.

The ontological politics of conservation are also evident in the theme of the COP15 meetings – Ecological Civilization: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth.⁶ The Government of China, President of COP15, has promoted the concept of ‘ecological civilization’ since 2007 as a developmental state characterized by the harmonious coexistence of humans and nature (Weins et al. 2022). While superficially analogous to ideas like sustainable development and ecological modernization, China’s understanding of itself as an ecological civilization has informed large-scale ecosystem engineering projects that have little in common with the preservationist thrust of mainstream conservation paradigms originating in the West. Forestry programs, for example, do not aim to ‘save the planet’ by protecting or restoring ‘natural’ ecosystems but to construct new ecologies that mitigate environmental risks and reflect a variety of cultural and economic goals (Weins et al. 2022).

My point is not that other governments ought to emulate China’s enthusiasm for ecological civilization but that the ontological separation of ‘nature’ and ‘society’ so deeply embedded in mainstream conservation is a matter of contestation for a number of stakeholders in the Kunming-Montreal Framework. This is most profoundly evident, I think, in Target 8, which requires signatories to:

Minimize the impact of climate change and ocean acidification on biodiversity and increase its resilience through mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction actions, including through nature-based solution and/or ecosystem-based approaches, while minimizing negative and fostering positive impacts of climate action on biodiversity (emphasis added).

In contrast with ecosystem restoration – which features in the long-term vision, two of the four goals and four of the 23 targets – Target 8 contains the only reference in the Kunming-Montreal Framework to climate adaptation. There are at least two ways in which this reference to adaptation can be read. The first is as a commitment to ensure that, wherever possible, actions taken to support climate adaptation in urban, agricultural, and other highly modified landscapes enhance biodiversity.⁷ The second is as a commitment to actions that support the adaptive capacity of ecosystems characteristic of less modified landscapes – the ‘natural’, ‘pristine’ and ‘wild’ ecosystems of primary concern to mainstream conservation. Both readings are complementary, but the second raises rather more difficult questions.

While it goes without saying that deep cuts to greenhouse gas emissions are needed to limit the pace and magnitude of future climate change, there is no shortage of evidence that species and ecosystems worldwide are failing to cope with change to which they are already exposed (Prober et al. 2019). As climate risks intensify, so too do calls to rethink environmental management in order to promote ecosystem resilience and adaptation (Prober et al. 2019; Williams et al. 2020). Options for doing so, in principle, include actions that: (1) improve the effectiveness of existing management practices; (2) improve ecosystem function and connectivity by scaling-up habitat restoration, protection, and sympathetic resource use; (3) help ecosystem recovery following extreme climate events through active restoration; (4) accelerate genetic adaptation through assisted gene flow, species migration, selective breeding etc.; and/or (5) buy time for evolutionary responses through solar radiation management or other techniques for moderating the short-term impact of climate extremes (Berseth 2022; Prober et al. 2019; Vella et al. 2021; Williams et al. 2020).

Pursuing the latter two options, in particular, in a socially just, politically acceptable, ecologically sound, and cost-effective manner will require substantial investments in research, consensus-building, and policy development (McLeod et al. 2022; Vella et al. 2021; Williams et al. 2020). This is not the place to review scientific or political debate over the viability and ethics of assisted ecosystem adaptation. However, it is worth highlighting the significant epistemic, ontological, and normative challenges a shift from protection- to resilience-based ecosystem management poses conservation science and governance (Berseth 2022; Vella et al. 2021).

The importance of governance to the entire Kunming-Montreal Framework vision is reflected in dedication of ten goals under ‘tools and solutions’ to policy, regulation, institution-building, finance, consumption, business, technical and scientific cooperation, gender equity, and more. There is not a single goal here that does not speak to the core concerns and expertise of the social sciences. I will highlight those related to financial instruments not because they are intrinsically more worthy of attention but because they dominate concrete implementation measures and commitments. The Framework’s headline commitment (Target 19(a)) to increasing biodiversity-related financial assistance to developing countries to US$30 billion by 2030 is accompanied by commitments to: encourage private sector investment in biodiversity, promote the use of market-based instruments such as ecosystem service payments and biodiversity offset markets, phase out subsidies and other incentives for activities harmful to biodiversity, facilitate sustainable consumption choices, and expand the monitoring, assessment and disclosure of biodiversity-related risks by large and transnational companies and financial institutions.

Mobilizing financial resources for action on biodiversity is wrapped up in a broader logic, in other words, of market reform – a logic in which institutional arrangements, regulatory architectures, policy instruments, and information flows work together to enable economically rational businesses and consumers to exercise social and environmental responsibility (Lockie 2020a). This logic represents yet another set of ontological interventions in which nature is commoditized, biodiversity is transformed into ecosystem service values, and rights to consume, produce and trade those values are institutionalized as property rights. Will these transformations change behaviours or unlock investment on a scale sufficient ‘to put nature on a path to recovery’ by 2030?⁸ Will they crowd out the community-based and other non-market approaches promoted by Target 19(f)?⁹ This is not the place to provide a detailed answer, but it is very much a question with which sociologists ought to be engaged. How they should be engaged is the question I will address in the following section.

Doing sociologies of biodiversity

As noted above, my main purpose in this essay is not to offer a comprehensive analysis of the Kunming-Montreal Framework but to encourage a diversity of sociological contributions to matters raised by the Framework. This section considers how those contributions might make a positive difference in terms of achieving better social and ecological outcomes from biodiversity policy, programs, and actions.

Seeking to make a positive difference does not mean setting our conception of sociology as a critical social science aside. Take, for example, the Kunming-Montreal Framework’s overwhelming reliance on market instruments. The instruments it portrays as innovative (payment for ecosystem services, green bonds, biodiversity offsets and credits, etc.) have been in use for decades (Lockie 2020a). So too have requirements for the disclosure of various aspects of non-financial business performance (Gupta, Boas, and Oosterveer 2020). The international community would do well to ignore hyperbole about innovation and learn the lessons embedded in what is a substantial body of research on the social and environmental effects of market instruments – including what this research tells us about the circumstances in which different market instruments may or may not be useful, the risks of unintended and perverse outcomes, and complementary or alternative measures worth considering to support policy goals (Lockie 2020a).

Where we do not have a substantial body of research to draw on is the use of mandatory disclosures, blended finance, impact investing etc. to leverage private finance. A slew of reports have been issued in recent years estimating the magnitude of investment in ‘nature-based solutions’ needed to reach climate and biodiversity goals and emphasizing the importance of the private sector in providing this investment (e.g. United Nations Environment Programme 2022). Removing perverse subsidies and requiring disclosure of climate and biodiversity-related financial risks make sense as strategies to influence how private actors conduct their own business but it requires quite a leap of faith to assume they will simultaneously motivate private financial investment in public-good biodiversity projects on any kind of scale. If there is a lesson to be learned though from other experiments in market-based environmental policy, it is to moderate expectations and stop treating market instruments as silver bullet solutions to complex and enduring policy problems.

Some readers will be wondering whether the Kunming-Montreal Framework will prove yet another ill-fated attempt to prop up fundamentally unsustainable capitalist systems through neoliberal policy reform. Maybe it will. Then again, maybe it will achieve its mission of halting and reversing biodiversity loss. Maybe it will stimulate significant private investment and meaningful change in business practices. Maybe there will be different outcomes altogether. Sociological research on market-based policy and the theoretical work it has informed provide a solid basis for challenging a number of assumptions built into the Framework, for raising questions that ought to be subject to ongoing research, and for informing dialogue with policy-makers and other stakeholders. However, making a difference in relation to biodiversity, climate, and other dimensions of global environmental change also requires us to find ways of engaging with multiple possible futures with which we have little or no prior experience, and which are characterized by high levels of uncertainty and moral ambiguity.

It is not that we are without tools for engaging with multiple possible futures. Social theory and methodology provide insight into the relevance of research to other times, places, and social groups. Many of the most important theoretical traditions in both general and environmental sociology are oriented toward informing social change. Processes of climate change and biodiversity loss do not require us to develop wholly new approaches to doing sociology but they do require us to reflect deeply on the interrelationships between these and other issues, and the implications for policy, research, and theory of indeterminate and non-linear processes of social and environmental change.¹⁰

Some of these implications are obvious. We should be quick to collaborate across disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. We should be prepared to question our own theoretical and practical assumptions. We should champion genuinely democratic deliberation over preferred futures. We should seek out diverse perspectives and be alert, always, for the unexpected. Less obvious perhaps, but no less important, is paying close attention to the work done through policy, research, social movements, etc. to bring new worlds into being. The ontological politics of conservation discussed in the previous section focus very much on this matter of bringing new worlds, or new futures, to reality. The ontological politics of global environmental change raise bigger questions again about how we are to live on a climate changed planet and how we are to make collective choices that support just and sustainable futures for all despite profound environmental change. While I don’t think there is one right way to do global change sociology, I do think there’s often more to be gained by considering how we can best support creative, participatory, and transparent dialogue on these matters than there is by rushing to take and defend our own positions.¹¹

Conclusion

The interrelationships between climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation etc. and human wellbeing are foregrounded in international agreements such as the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. There is considerable discussion in the international literature of how social sciences ought to respond to climate change,¹² but rather less of how social sciences ought to deal with global environmental change writ large. Sociologies of biodiversity and its connections with the myriad social and ecological processes constitutive of global environmental change warrant more of our collective attention.

Positive engagement with policy and institutional reform may not be the only way to produce sociologies of biodiversity that make a difference but it is at least one of them. All sciences have a role to play in monitoring progress against the targets established through international agreements and other attempts at reform, in understanding the causal processes responsible both for progress and for unintended consequences, in drawing attention to unforeseen challenges and emerging issues, and in the anticipatory work of developing responses to those issues and challenges. Sociology’s role in contributing to dialogue over the world-building intent of responses to global environmental change is not unique, but I do think we have a particular responsibility for facilitating the inclusion in that dialogue of voices, interests and insights that may otherwise be excluded.

Notes

1. Convention on Biological Diversity, Conference of the Parties draft decision CBD/COP/15/L.25 issued 18 December 2022.

2. See, for example, joint submissions by multiple indigenous peoples’ organizations and allies at www.survivalinternational.org/news/13573 and www.projectexpeditejustice.org/post/cop15-concerns [accessed 7 January 2012].

3. Mainstream conservation is characterized, according to Büscher and Fletcher (2019), by a focus on protecting nature from people through the expansion of protected areas and by growing interest in strategies to leverage capital investment in conservation through the valuation of ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services.’

4. www.survivalinternational.org/articles/30-per-cent-statement [accessed 7 January 2012].

5. Article 8(j) of the Convention on Biological Diversity, for example, requires parties to ‘respect, preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities embodying traditional lifestyles relevant for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity’ (emphasis added).

6. Convention on Biological Diversity, Conference of the Parties Declaration from the High-Level Segment of the UN Biodiversity Conference (Part 1), CBD/COP/15/5/Add.1, issued 13 October 2021.

7. Urban greening programs, for example, can mitigate climate risks such as extreme heat events while, at the same time, addressing biodiversity goals including species conservation and habitat connectivity.

8. Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework mission for 2030.

9. See Cinner et al. (2021) for a theoretical and empirical examination of how markets crowd out voluntary conservation activity.

10. Hence the call of authors including Lockie (2014) and Ruwet (2021) for more explicit theorization of time and temporality within environmental sociology.

11. There is a growing body of literature critical of assisted ecosystem adaptation, for example, which I do not review here but which is addressed by Lockie (2020b) and Vella et al. (2021).

12. The evidence on which criticisms of sociology for not taking climate change seriously are based is reviewed and critiqued in Lockie (2022).