Realising the Urban Opportunity: Cities and the Post-2020 Biodiversity Governance

Cities and global biodiversity goals

This policy brief describes the crucial role cities hold for realising global goals for nature. Whether or not the global community is able to achieve its goals for biodiversity over the next three decades will critically depend on how both the threats and opportunities of living on an urban planet are addressed. Advancing transformative change for biodiversity will require municipal authorities and a range of other urban actors to mainstream action on both the direct and indirect drivers of biodiversity loss — from land-use change to sustainable production and consumption — while ensuring that the value of nature and its contribution to people and society is widely recognised across urban communities. In this policy brief, we set out how we can harness the urban opportunity in the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).

Increasing momentum

Despite increasing the momentum for urban action and a growing rhetoric of including ‘all levels of government’ in the implementation of the GBF, the envisaged role of cities in the CBD is too narrowly drawn. As a result, the range of urban capacities across multiple actors needed for transformative action — from procurement to investment, partnership and experimentation — has yet to be harnessed. In the negotiations, growing calls for a ‘whole of society’ approach to the next decade of biodiversity action mask a continued dependence on the machinery of existing approaches and implementation mechanisms in the CBD, which further limits the degree to which urban actors are likely to engage in the transformative change required to realise global ambitions.

Opportunities for action

Moving forward will require shifting the dial away from seeing cities primarily as a threat to biodiversity to recognising that they offer significant opportunities for action. It will be vital that cities are given a prominent position in the post-2020 global biodiversity framework and its underlying theory of change. This position needs to reflect the potential and responsibilities that cities have for both addressing the loss of nature and enhancing nature’s contribution to people and society in line with the urban agenda. Urban action for nature is already generating significant benefits for cities in terms of climate change, health and urban regeneration. To support the realisation of the urban opportunity for post-2020 biodiversity governance, this policy brief shows the contribution that cities can make, the capacities they bring to the table, and the kinds of co-benefits that are likely to be generated as a result.