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GBF-aligned NBSAPS to ensure just, sustainable futures for all life to thrive: the role of African civil society

FACTSHEET 6

Target 8: Minimise the impacts of climate change on biodiversity and build resilience

The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) is committed to dismantling inequalities and resisting corporate industrial expansion in Africa’s food and agriculture systems.

PO Box 29170, Melville 2109, Johannesburg, South Africa

Tel: +27 (0)11 486-1156

Researched and written by ACB research consultant Linzi Lewis

Editorial oversight and input by ACB executive director Mariam Mayet

Design and layout: Katerina Sonntagova, Moss and Sea Studio

Cover art: Rock Pools by Jess Hooft, https://www.jesshooft-art.com/

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The ACB gratefully acknowledges the financial support of several donors, though the views expressed may not necessarily reflect the views of our donors.

March 2026

Acronyms

CBD Convention on Biological Diversity

DRR Disaster risk reduction

FAO UN Food and Agriculture Organization

GCRMN Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network

GHG Greenhouse gases

GIZ German Agency for International Cooperation

ICJ International Court of Justice

ICRI International Coral Reef Initiative

IPBES Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services

IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

KM-GBF Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework

NbS Nature-based solutions

NBSAPs National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans

NDCs Nationally Determined Contributions

UN United Nations

UNEA United Nations Environment Assembly

UNEP United Nations Environment Programme

UNFCCC UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

Climate change represents one of the largest existential threats to modern human society and the planet. The consequences of climate change are severe and far-reaching; they affect both natural ecosystems and human populations. Rising temperatures are causing the melting of ice sheets and glaciers, leading to sea level rise and threatening coastal communities with unprecedented flooding.

Extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, droughts, and heatwaves, are becoming more frequent and intensive, devastating agriculture, displacing populations and exacerbating water shortages (ICJ, 2025: p. 34).

The disruption of natural habitats is pushing certain species toward extinction and leading to irreversible loss of biodiversity. Human life and health are also at risk, with an increased incidence of heat-related illnesses and the spread of climate-related diseases. The current extent and pace of biodiversity loss and nature’s decline, combined with the magnitude of the multiple interconnected global crises, including climate change and pollution, seriously and irreversibly threaten life on Earth (IPBES, 2025). Despite its minimal role in causing climate change, Africa bears its most severe impacts, with escalating climate shocks deepening food, water, health, and mobility crises—an urgency that must anchor all policy discussion.

We are at, and may already have exceeded, critical tipping points because of overstepping various planetary boundaries associated with these crises. It is therefore imperative that countries step up and step forward to prevent a future uncontrollable climate and ecological breakdown. With industrial agriculture and food systems being significant drivers of biodiversity loss and climate change, in this factsheet, we focus on Target 8 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF): Minimise the impacts of climate change on biodiversity and build resilience, and its intersection with agricultural and food systems in Africa.

Against this backdrop, it becomes essential to situate these global climate and biodiversity dynamics within Africa’s specific ecological, social, and political realities, where land-use change, industrial agriculture, and emerging climate responses intersect most sharply with the ambitions and weaknesses of Target 8.

Background: Climate change, biodiversity loss, and industrial agriculture

Climate change is the result of an accumulation of certain gases in the atmosphere that trap the sun’s radiation around the Earth, leading to a greenhouse warming effect. While certain greenhouse gases (GHG) occur naturally, it is scientifically established that the increase in concentration of GHG in the atmosphere is primarily due to human activities, whether as a result of GHG emissions, including by the burning of fossil fuels, or as a result of the weakening or destruction of carbon reservoirs and sinks, such as forests and the ocean, which store or remove GHGs from the atmosphere (ICJ, 2025: p. 34).

Climate change is a major and increasing driver of biodiversity loss (Benton et al., 2021). For example, between 8% and 20% of global vegetation is likely to be at risk of severe ecosystem change with a 2°C increase in global mean temperature, and 20% to 38% of global vegetation will likely be at risk with a 3°C increase (Warszawski et al., 2013). With a global average temperature increase of 2°C, 3%–18% of assessed terrestrial species are likely to face a high risk of extinction, rising to 3%–39% with a 4°C increase, primarily due to habitat loss (IPCC, 2022).

Modern food systems are a major direct contributor to GHG emissions. Crippa et al. (2021) established that food systems account for more than one-third of global anthropogenic GHG emissions, of which the largest contribution came from agriculture and land-use/land-cover change (71%), with the remaining from supply chain activities: retail, transport, consumption, fuel production, waste management, industrial processes, and packaging.

In the ocean, rising temperatures increase the risk of irreversible loss of marine and coastal ecosystems (Cooley et al., 2022). For instance, 14% of the world’s coral reefs were lost between 2009 and 2018, mostly due to climate change, and further warming threatens to destroy almost all remaining reefs (ICRI et al., 2021). Rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations have also resulted in ocean acidification.

At the multilateral level, governments tackle global environmental issues such as climate change and biodiversity through two international agreements—the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), both established at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. As a result, despite the inherent overlaps between biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation and adaptation, currently National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) under the CBD and Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement are addressed as separate policy processes (Blue Marine Foundation et al., 2024).

Target 8

Target 8 of the KM-GBF follows on from Aichi Target 10, which was not achieved and, in fact, worsened, over this period. Target 8 aims to:

Minimise 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 minimising negative and fostering positive impacts of climate action on biodiversity.

Despite Target 8 providing an opportunity to bridge biodiversity and climate agendas, it suffers from the lack of a globally agreed headline indicator. There are, however, a variety of component and complementary indicators that countries can draw on. Yet these indicators fail to ensure that the relationship between biodiversity and climate change is adequately addressed. In the absence of headline indicators—and with weak component and complementary metrics—African governments must make climate–biodiversity linkages explicit in NBSAPs and NDCs, and guard against Target 8 being used to promote harmful false solutions.

Climate change mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction in Africa

Climate change is already gripping countries across the African continent, with increased occurrence and severity of floods, droughts, and desertification (Saber et al., 2025). Climate disasters are expected to increase in both magnitude and frequency in Africa because of climate change. Landscape and ecosystem degradation, along with biodiversity loss, increase these risks substantially, reducing the ability of the landscape to withstand shocks and to adapt, as well as altering the sinks and sources of carbon associated with biodiversity, in particular coral reefs, forests, and soils.

In response to increasing threats and risks associated with climate change, the discussion centres around mitigation, adaptation, and disaster risk reduction (DRR). As such, this target aims to address the impacts of climate change on biodiversity by focusing on the role of the highly contentious concept of nature-based solutions (NbS), in addition to the already globally agreed concept of ecosystem approaches.1

NbS are increasingly promoted as responses to climate change and biodiversity loss, yet their definitions remain vague and open to wide interpretation, enabling activities such as large-scale conservation enclosures, industrial plantations, and agricultural projects to be classified as NbS, despite their harmful impacts (Kill, 2024). These approaches mirror existing patterns in carbon and biodiversity offsetting and are driven by financial interests that obscure corporate power and delay real emission reductions, contributing to continued ecological breakdown. While the United Nations Environment Assembly (UNEA) acknowledges that NbS cannot replace deep and rapid GHG reductions, this recognition is absent from corporate “net-zero” strategies, which rely heavily on NbS to avoid systemic change (UNEA, 2022; Lahiri and Martínez, 2024). As a result, NbS interventions have frequently triggered land grabs and human rights violations, despite extensive evidence that Indigenous Peoples and local communities are among the most effective stewards of biodiversity (Kill, 2024; IPBES, 2019). With NbS now integrated into the KM-GBF, the risk of their co-option remains acute, underscoring the need for robust safeguards and human rights-based approaches to mitigation, adaptation, DRR, and biodiversity conservation.

1 According to the COP 5 Decision V/6 of the CBD, the ecosystem approach is a strategy for the integrated management of land, water and living resources that promotes conservation and sustainable use in an equitable way. It recognises that humans, with their cultural diversity, are an integral component of ecosystems (CBD, 1999).

Biodiversity conservation in a time of climate change

The pace of climate change may exceed the capacity of many species to track suitable living conditions (Foden et al., 2019). Even if global warming is limited to 1.5–2°C, some temperature-sensitive ecosystems, such as coral reefs and mangroves, will be unable to persist beyond the 2040s based on conservation and restoration efforts alone (IPCC, 2022). Adaptive conservation approaches will be necessary to prevent numerous ecosystems from disappearing, along with their contributions to human societies (Schlaepfer & Lawler, 2022).

Recent studies have argued that the protection of biodiversity and efforts to address climate change are largely aligned (Pörtner et al., 2021; Shin et al., 2022). Indeed, some undisturbed, species-rich ecosystems, such as mangroves and wetlands, tend to be efficient at carbon sequestration. In addition, measures that reduce anthropogenic GHG emissions also reduce the threat to biodiversity (Boulton et al., 2022; Morecroft et al., 2019). Despite some elements of alignment, rapid climate change represents a fundamentally new challenge that will reshape both conservation objectives and tactics.

Climate change is driving broad-scale species redistribution and is expected to accelerate in the coming decades, raising questions about the effectiveness of existing protected areas for biodiversity conservation (Cui et al., 2025). Beyond this, the longtime lag of GHG implies that climate change will inevitably occur and is locked in for centuries to come (Clark et al., 2016). Novel, innovative approaches to biodiversity conservation will be required, such as recognising the interdependencies between people and biodiversity, urban biodiversity, and low-impact/regenerative forms of agriculture and forestry that reconcile biodiversity and contributions to humans. Such approaches should increasingly be viewed as compatible with conservation objectives; whereby conservation measures allow for, and even foster, changes in biodiversity (Schlaepfer & Lawler, 2022).

For African countries, where climate impacts are already reshaping ecosystems, it is essential that Target 8 responses incorporate forward-looking, climate-aware conservation strategies to prevent further biodiversity loss.

Agroecological transitions as an effective, ecosystem-based approach

Some NDCs by UNFCCC member states highlight the role of the agricultural sector and the strong adaptation and mitigation benefits and synergies, with more than 10% of NDCs explicitly mentioning agroecology as a valid approach to address climate change (GIZ, 2023), with Target 10 of the KM-GBF including agroecology. Implementation of locally relevant agroecological practices would also help achieve other targets, most notably Targets 7 and 10. Agroecological transitions offer a potent example of transformative change in food systems, redirecting unsustainable agricultural practices towards biodiverse and equitable solutions (Bezner-Kerr et al., 2023).

Agroecological practices may include landscape and farm diversification, intercropping, crop and pasture rotation, cover crops, reducing carbon demands, and avoiding synthetic inputs. Social dimensions of agroecology include co-creation of knowledge with farmers and local communities, participatory processes, non-wage labour relations, collective property and resource management, and addressing social inequities (Bezner-Kerr et al., 2023). In recognition of the critical role of small-scale farmers, these transitions address food security, poverty, biodiversity restoration, and climate change adaptation. Therefore, agroecology is an effective ecosystem-based approach that has the potential to provide climate adaptation and mitigation benefits and DRR, as well as increasing biodiversity on and off farm; supporting ecosystem functions, soil, and carbon storage; and reducing water and land degradation; among other benefits (Minasny et al., 2017; FAO, 2018; IPBES, 2025).

Agroecology shows that climate-resilient, biodiversity-positive food systems are already within reach, grounded in the knowledge and rights of African farmers and communities. As Parties operationalise Target 8, such approaches must take precedence over technocratic or profit-driven measures that risk deepening vulnerability.

Considerations

To advance Target 8 in the absence of headline indicators—and given the weakness of existing component and complementary indicators—we call on African governments to:

• Align climate and biodiversity strategies by integrating CBD and UNFCCC commitments into a coherent, long-term national framework.

• Prioritise agroecological transitions in NBSAPs and NDCs as the most effective, rights-based pathway to build resilience, restore biodiversity, and cut emissions.

• Reject harmful NbS-labelled interventions that enable offsetting, land grabs, or ecological harm.

• Strengthen Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ rights as central to climate and biodiversity governance.

• Deepen regional cooperation to manage transboundary climate and ecological risks.

• Scale up climate finance, awareness, and community engagement to support just and effective implementation.

• Reinforce health systems to address climate-sensitive diseases.

• Adopt integrated adaptation, mitigation, and DRR strategies, including early warning systems, rights-based restoration, and support for indigenous crops and climate-smart water management.

Conclusion

Two of the main environmental challenges of our times, climate change and biodiversity loss, are inextricably intertwined. Without serious, concerted efforts to reduce GHG emissions, many life systems on Earth will be significantly and irreversibly altered. As we stand on the precipice of climate and ecological collapse, we demand that policymakers take the urgent and necessary steps to mitigate the drivers of these crises, including uncontrolled carbon emissions from a high-risk and harmful energy sector and from expanding industrial agricultural input and food supply chains.

Africa, which contributes significantly less global GHG emissions, is widely recognised as the most vulnerable continent to the impacts of climate change, facing various environmental and climate-related challenges that pose a significant threat to its economic and social development (IPCC, 2021; Adedini et al., 2023; Bedair et al., 2023). Climate change exacerbates existing problems such as food insecurity, water scarcity, and displacement, as well as other risks (Busayo & Kalumba, 2020). Combating the consequences of these challenges requires a multifaceted approach that includes improving healthcare access, ensuring clean water and sanitation, bolstering disaster preparedness and response, increasing investment in research and development, promoting public awareness, and advocating for transformative and sustainable development (Ameer & Saba, 2023).

There is no time to continue to discuss these issues in silos. We need all Parties to align NDCs with NBSAPs, which articulate and specify agroecological transitions in food production, distribution, and consumption, to effectively mitigate and adapt to climate change and increase resilience.

Africa stands on the front lines of the climate and biodiversity crises, yet it also holds some of the world’s most powerful solutions. By rejecting false pathways, strengthening community rights, and choosing agroecology and ecosystem integrity as the backbone of implementation, African governments can transform Target 8 from a weakly guided global commitment into a bold, continent-driven agenda for resilience and justice.

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