Technical Analysis of the Global Biodiversity Framework

First published on 05/14/2025

By the ICCA Consortium

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In the early hours of December 18, 2022, Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework after lengthy negotiations and a complicated process. The framework includes a 2050 Vision, a Mission, Goals and Milestones, Action Targets, and other details.

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Back in 2018, the ICCA Consortium made a submission on the preparation, scope, and content of the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Our submission outlined key substantive issues that would elicit the ‘biggest gains’ for biodiversity conservation and that needed to be systematically addressed in the Framework.

It focused on three key issues:

• Appropriately recognizing and supporting Indigenous Peoples and local communities and their efforts to govern, manage, maintain, protect, and conserve their collective territories of life on their terms, including through self-determined governance institutions, customary laws and protocols, and systems of Indigenous and local knowledge and customary and communal sustainable use;
• Halting industrial drivers of biodiversity loss, including by eliminating perverse investments and incentives that are harmful to biodiversity; and
• Preventing and prohibiting attacks on the communities, organizations, and individuals who defend biodiversity and the territories of life against threats.

Since then, the ICCA Consortium has consistently advocated for these priorities, with the addition of human rights as a fourth and overarching priority in early 2020.

Not all these key issues were systematically incorporated into the Global Biodiversity Framework when it was finally adopted in December 2022. However, the new framework is arguably a new high watermark for recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights in multilateral environmental policy. This results from several years of sustained collective effort by Indigenous and local community organizations, including ICCA Consortium Members, and many other supporting organizations within the official CBD process and in many national contexts.

The new global biodiversity framework analysis focuses on specific targets relevant to the ICCA Consortium’s Members and custodians of territories of life. It reflects on the main priorities identified in our 2018 submission at the start of the negotiation process. It highlights key considerations in the following six themes:

1. Systematic integration of human rights, the rights-based approach, justice, and equity;
2. Legal recognition of collective lands, waters, and territories of life;
3. Beyond protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures;
4. Perverse investments and incentives, positive incentives, and resource mobilization;
5. Protection of environmental human rights defenders; and
6. Implementation mechanisms.