Obura IUCN Africa Conservation Forum-Keynote 26June24

Setting the scene: African Solutions for Nature and People - Creating transformative responses to the biodiversity and climate crisis in Africa.

IUCN Africa Regional Forum, 26-28 June 2024, Nairobi.

David Obura, 26 Jun 24 – Keynote presentation.

The sustainable development paradigm is the organizing principle in global policy – framed by Agenda 2030/the SDGs and supported by thematic frameworks such as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which guides global efforts for biodiversity conservation sustainable use and equitable benefit sharing to 2030. Implementing these global goals in Africa supports the development needs, livelihoods and cultures of its growing population, including many Indigenous Peoples and rural/urban communities with high dependence on nature and exposure to global threats such as climate change. The urgency of action is critical – overconsumption and growth of the global economy, climate change and meeting the needs of the global population are pushing the world’s biodiversity to a breaking point that we need to retreat from. IPBES’s framing of nature, economy and society offers a lens into solutions for Africa’s current and near-term challenges, and identifying opportunities for ‘transformative responses’.

Conservation in Africa has shown many successes, and secures significant parts of global biodiversity, while facing and embodying many historical and contemporary challenges that actors are still working to resolve. A critical challenge is that posed by economic extraction and use that drives degradation of nature, now exceeding planetary boundaries at the global level while African economies have yet to reach equitable levels of prosperity. New approaches across all economic sectors are urgently needed, including ecosystem-based or regenerative approaches, and practices that work with nature, not against it.

Historically, wealth derived from exploitation of nature has accumulated in developed countries, and wealthy sectors within countries. Transforming this system so all people and countries secure their fair share of benefits from their nature, and the global commons, will be foundational to successful rebalancing of the relationships between nature, economy and society. This will enable the required levels of finance to be re-invested in nature, in particular reaching the grassroots where communities steward nature on a daily basis.

A new narrative for conservation in Africa that meets the above challenges can be embedded with IUCN’s 20 year strategy, and guide the new work programme for 2026-2029. The keynote addresses these challenges, showing how the great transformations called for for IUCN can be supported through enhanced and more integrative actions, focusing on local landscapes and seascapes, new regenerative practices, a core commitment to equity, and assuring financial systems transform from nature-negative to nature-positive focus.

Key messages:
1) Ramp up ambition on all/integrated actions.
• Pay full attention to context, enabling/ obstructing factors, equity and rights, agency.
• Conservation actions, nature based solutions, sustainable production & use
• Reducing drivers in high-income countries and sectors.

2) It is time for equity, finally, to focus on meeting peoples’ needs.
• History has not been kind, a new social contract is necessary within and across countries.
• The needs of the most vulnerable must be put at the center of ambition (10 : 40 : 50).
• “Nature AND People positive”
3) Return finance into nature as the critical asset supporting the entirety of economies and society, not just niche areas.
• Meet direct finance needs, natural assets in every sq. km
• Subsidies/incentives must be transformed so nature-negative flows become nature-positive.