Humanity is at a crossroads inaddressingbiodiversity loss. Several assessments have reported on the weak compliance with the Aichi Biodiversity Targets by the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). To address this lack of compliance, the challenges in implementing and enforcingCBDobligations must be understood. Key implementation challenges of the CBD are identified through a content analysis of policy documents, multi-stakeholder interviews, and participant observation at the recent CBD Conference of the Parties. Building on this analysis, the article explores the extent to which the review mechanisms of international human rights law, with their various strategies for eliciting compliance, can help to improve CBDmechanisms. The findings of this article reveal insights that the CBD can draw from international human rights law to address these compliance challenges, such as facilitating the participation of civil society organizations to provide specific input, and engaging independent biodiversity experts to assess implementation. The article concludes that insights fromhuman rights review mechanisms are useful for improving the emerging peer reviewmechanismof the CBD, which is important for strengthening accountability within the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.

A recent coffee leaf rust epidemic has generated a severe fall in Coffea arabica production throughout Mexico and Central America. This paper analyzes the social-ecological crisis presented by the Hemileia vastatrix outbreak, with a focus on how global, regional and national dynamics interact with local processes in the Chiapas Sierra Madre of south-eastern Mexico, a biodiversity hotspot with a tradition of smallholder, shade-grown coffee production. We explore the hypothesis that the current coffee rust epidemic is an expression of global environmental change, with implications for legal frameworks and international efforts towards risk management and climate change adaptation. Addressing debates on legal resilience building, we illustrate how mismatches of scale between social-ecological phenomena and legal and institutional arrangements may generate pathological solutions for small-scale coffee producers and shade-grown coffee ecosystems. Thereafter, using the analytical lens of modularity, the paper sheds light on landscape stewardship to reduce the risks of non-resilient characteristics such as isolation, on the one hand, and on the other, over-connectedness of habitat patches in the landscape of importance for ecosystem functions at larger scales. The interdisciplinary framework leads to recognizing the role of institutions and legal arrangements which are not limited to national boundaries in proposing solutions to this social-ecological crisis. We find that matching scales of law with agroforestry systems can be done through a variety of legal and policy instruments to contribute to resilience building. This matching of scales is vital to safeguarding biodiversity's global benefits and the right of small-scale coffee farmers to a healthy and sustainable environment.

This article assesses the synergies and conflicts between the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the European Union Timber Regulation (EUTR), and the potential role of the CBD principles and rights perspective in improving coherence across these diverse forest-related agreements. We find that both the EUTR, which aims to eliminate illegal wood from EU supply chains, and the CBD, with its core focus on biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, share the stated goals of safeguarding biodiversity and local livelihoods. However, the principle of inclusive governance and sustainable use embedded in the CBD conflicts with the EUTR. The EUTR focus on law enforcement asserts the primacy of state laws independently of their sustainability content and alignment with international human rights law. We find that the EUTR risks reinforcing legal frameworks that preference large-scale export production over local forest access, use and benefits. Better aligning the EUTR with CBD safeguards firstly requires opening-up the EUTR rule-making process to broader engagement with affected groups. Secondly, our analysis of both the procedural and substantive dimensions of the EUTR and the CBD safeguards, suggests that opportunities for better alignment lie in the nexus between procedural rights, of which law enforcement forms part of a broader vision of rule of law and conflict resolution, and the strengthening of substantive rights that benefit local forest use and conservation.

The format for formal international negotiations on environment and development sometimes prevents negotiators from truly listening to each other and adapt pre-existing positions to realize constructive conflict resolution. In this paper we present and analyse Multi-Actor Dialogue Seminars (MADS) as an approach to contribute to transformative social learning and conflict resolution, and the contribution to tangible and intangible outcomes in formal negotiations. Unlike negotiations, the objective of MADS is not to agree on a text, but to identify areas of agreement and disagreement, build trust and understanding and identify policy options that are tailored to different cultural-political and value systems. As a case study we use the breakdown of the negotiations at the formal Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)Conference in 2010 regarding innovative financial mechanisms, and subsequent two international Quito Dialogues using the MADS approach. Through a composite of methods this article reveals the effects of the Quito Dialogues on formal CBD negotiations. The Quito Dialogues contributed to bringing actors out of their deadlock and thereby paving the way for constructive results in the formal CBD negotiations, evident by references in CBD Decisions adopted by 196 CBD Parties. We discuss key design and implementation factors which were decisive for these effects including the importance of a bridging organization, trust building, exploration of both convergences and divergences, involvement of participants with diverse and conflicting views early in the planning, promotion of active listening and addressing diverse knowledge systems and power asymmetries.

International schemes for financing conservation and climate mitigation, such as Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation and forest enhancement (REDD+), have generated concerns about the effect of large influxes of money on good governance, the human rights of local land users, and biodiversity. While there is agreement on the need for safeguards to prevent negative effects, how prescriptive or flexible those safeguards should be is not well understood. We develop a framework for a multi-scale comparison of the prescriptiveness of measures to reduce carbon emissions with safeguards for community rights and biodiversity, and apply this framework to international REDD+ safeguards and their transformation into Mexican law. Our findings reveal significant differences across substantive and procedural safeguards with positive and negative impacts on community rights. We also find that not prescribing ownership over forest carbon and de-bundling property rights from rights to benefit from ecosystems stewardship, helped overcome political conflicts in Mexico and enhanced the potential for equity in REDD+ outcomes.

Global risks are now increasingly being perceived as networked, and likely to result in large-scale, propagating failures and crises that transgress national boundaries and societal sectors. These so called globally networked risks pose fundamental challenges to global governance institutions. A growing literature explores the nature of these globally networked or systemic risks. While this research has taught us much about the anatomy of these risks, it has consistently failed to integrate insights from the wider social sciences. This is problematic since the prescriptions that result from these efforts flow from naive assumptions about the way real-world state and non-state actors behave in the international arena. This leaves serious gaps in our understanding of whether networked environmental risks at all can be governed. The following essay brings together decades of research by different disciplines in the social sciences, and identifies five multi-disciplinary key insights that can inform global approaches to governing these. These insights include the influence of international institutions; the dynamics and effect of international norms and legal mechanisms; the need for international institutions to cope with transboundary and cross-sectoral crises; the role of innovation as a strategy to handle unpredictable global risks; and the necessity to address legitimacy issues.

Ecological compensation (EC) is being explored as a policy instrument for the European Union's 'No Net Loss of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services' initiative. EC is commonly associated with the Polluter-Pays Principle, but we propose the Developer-Pays Principle as a more comprehensive principle. Safeguards that are relevant to local and national contexts are needed when addressing social-ecological resilience in the face of risks associated with EC. The operationalisation of EC in Sweden is assessed through two case studies: the E12 highway and Mertainen mine. The institutional design and implementation procedures are investigated through semi-structured interviews as well as an analysis of legal and other written documents. Using a multi-level governance framework, we examine four key disputed issues within compensation. Our results suggest that (i) Risk of a license-to-trash can be minimised; (ii) Complementary quantitative and qualitative ecological valuation methods are needed to achieve additionality and No Net Loss; (iii) Compensation pools may be a promising strategy to secure land availability; and (iv) Social safeguards are vital for EC in high-income countries as well, where they are currently understudied. We conclude that EC cannot be the main instrument for nature conservation, but rather complementary to a strong legal framework that protects biodiversity and ecosystems in addition to the sustained and equitable benefits of ecosystem services.

This paper examines the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change mechanism Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+), and its associated multitude of global to local safeguards, as they apply to a single ejido on the Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico. It draws on written sources and interviews to analyze the ways in which broad international norms articulated through the REDD+ safeguards, including support for human rights and sustainable livelihoods for local communities, are translated at national, regional, and local levels. Our findings indicate a wide range of perspectives on what constitutes sustainability, from strict conservation to more forest use-oriented strategies, such as community forestry and traditional Mayan shifting cultivation. These visions, in turn, shape what types of REDD+ interventions are considered a good environmental fit,i. e., that fit the environmental problems they aim to address. Fits and misfits also occur between institutions, and play a core role in determining whose visions of sustainability prevail. We found a good fit in the case study ejido between REDD+ and the Payment for Ecosystem service (PES) scheme, which sets the parameters for what counts as sustainable livelihoods within a strict conservation paradigm. We likewise found a good fit between REDD+ safeguards and institutions supporting local community rights to reject REDD+ projects. However, despite the strength of procedural safeguards, the parameters of the PES scheme constrained the choice of REDD+ activities available, including the possibilities of local people to work on the farm and in the forest, and hence the scope of its distributive benefits. This highlights the important, but also problematic, roles of institutional and environmental fit in determining whose rights are safeguarded and what is recognized as a sustainable livelihood strategy. It also calls for more proactive efforts to expand the range of REDD+ activities in ways that safeguard livelihood diversity.

Commodification of nature refers to the expansion of market trade to previously non-marketed spheres. This is a contested issue both in the scientific literature and in policy deliberations. The aim of this paper is to analytically clarify and distinguish between different purposes and degrees of commodification and to focus attention to the safeguards: the detailed institutional design. We identify six degrees of commodification and find that all ecosystem services policies are associated with some degree of commodification but only the two highest degrees can properly be associated with neoliberalisation of nature. For example, most payments for ecosystem services (PES) are subsidy-like government compensations not based on monetary valuation of nature. Biodiversity offsets can be designed as market schemes or non-market regulations; the cost-effectiveness of markets cannot be assumed. To avoid the confusion around the concept 'market-based instrument' we suggest replacing it with 'economic instruments' since relying on the price signal is not the same thing as relying on the market. We provide a comprehensive framework emphasising the diversity in institutional design, valuation approaches and role of markets. This provides flexibility and options for policy integration of biodiversity and ecosystem services in different countries according to their political and cultural context.

Schemes for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and enhancing carbon stocks (REDD+) have raised concerns about their effects on forest communities and social equity more generally. National legal frameworks play a critical role in mediating these concerns within different country contexts, from the definition of fundamental constitutional rights to the articulation of specific REDD+ legislation. However, the complexity of REDD+ and its associated legal frameworks makes assessing the balance of rights, responsibilities, benefits and costs challenging indeed. This paper draws on a case study of Indonesia to illustrate how the application of an equity framework can help navigate this complexity. The paper applies the McDermott et al. (2013) Equity Framework to assess core legal texts at multiple scales, including key articles of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, as well as Indonesia's Constitution, its REDD+ strategy and selected legislation. We find that these selected legal instruments address the procedural issue of who is considered a relevant REDD+ stakeholder, including forest-dependent communities and private and public actors. Policies in the form of Ministerial Decrees also prescribe the distribution of carbon payments. However, the current legislation does not address critical contextual dimensions, including the distribution of bundles of rights and obligations regarding land and forest entitlements of forest-dependent people. Likewise, while there are Ministerial Decrees that spell out the distribution of rights and duties of different levels of government (central, provincial and local), there is no clear indication if the resources needed to ensure their respective attributions are equitably allocated. These results highlight the importance of adopting comprehensive frameworks for assessing equity that situate detailed analysis of specific REDD+-related laws within their broader legal and fiscal contexts.