There were two globally-important COP meetings held late last year. Everyone knows about the Conference of Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in Egypt in November. This COP was a disappointment to many for failing to tackle carbon emissions; as the UN itself says, the highlight was the establishment of a fund to help countries cope with the effects of climate change, which seems like giving up.

That’s why we’re more excited about the “Other COP”, the Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, held a few weeks later in Canada. This COP directly addressed the main driver of biodiversity loss: destruction and degradation of natural ecosystems. Its Global Biodiversity Framework, negotiated through the night and announced on December 19th, sets a target to bring the loss of highly biodiverse areas to close to zero by 2030. In fact, since deforestation is responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions, it seems likely that this COP will do more to fight climate change than the one that was actually supposed to be about climate change.

At the Forest Conservation Fund, we’re most excited about the way that the Global Biodiversity Framework aims to go about stopping biodiversity loss: by aiming to protect 30% of our planet by 2030 -- an increase from 17% of land and 8% of our seas today. But this is not a call, as in previous years, to simply set up new government-managed protected areas. Instead, the Framework recognizes the importance of existing Indigenous territories to contribute to this target, and the need to involve local communities in governance of conservation areas.

Conservation does not succeed without the support of local communities. If they are not benefiting from the conservation activities, or even worse, if they are no longer allowed to access forest resources and culturally important sites, the project will suffer from illegal activity and social unrest. Where communities are included in the governance of the site and are able to benefit from it, they have a shared interest to ensure protection and sustainable management of valued natural resources. The forest guard team is multiplied severalfold by community members keeping eyes and ears out for illegal logging, poaching, and mining activities.

This leads us to another thing we’re excited about in the Global Biodiversity Framework: the phrase “effectively conserved”. That we need to actively protect ‘protected areas’ seems obvious, but one of the reasons we set up the Forest Conservation Fund that more than half of protected areas are not meeting their conservation goals, with many of them ‘paper parks’ with no actual conservation activities. Protecting biodiversity takes money . . . not much, but some. Funding is needed for patrol teams, boundary signs, biodiversity monitoring equipment, education, and economic development investments so that nearby communities can thrive thanks to the project.

All of this means that to meet the targets laid out in the Global Biodiversity Framework, not only do we need to create new conservation areas in partnership with communities, but we need to make sure these new areas have the funding they need to actually be protected. The Forest Conservation Fund was created exactly for this purpose: our mission is to link funding to community-managed biodiverse rainforests so that these precious resources are effectively protected. We identify new conservation projects, where forest communities have just gotten their tenure or management rights recognized, or where new co-management agreements to include communities have been negotiated, and link them to operational funding from companies and other donors who want to keep those forests standing.

Meeting the targets laid out in the Global Biodiversity Framework will help us tackle the twin global challenges of biodiversity loss and climate change, and do so in a way that secures human rights and contributes to economic development in forest landscapes. FCF is excited to offer a way for individuals, donors, and the private sector to support this global challenge. Get in touch with us to see how you can get involved!