I spend a lot of my time working on initiatives that address climate change, nature loss, and the building of community resilience. The science is not in dispute, and the solutions are not hidden. We even have the technologies, finance mechanisms, and policy frameworks to help us analyse the challenge and opportunities.
We have everything we need except, it seems, the will to act and our willingness to confront and overcome those who benefit from the current system and resist change. What I think we must now confront head on is accountability. Because when we know what must be done, we have the means to do it, and still we delay, the problem is no longer technical. It is a moral and inherently political one.
We can no longer disagree that the climate crisis is the greatest transfer of suffering from those who created a problem to those who did not. Those who have done the least, including future generations, will be hit the hardest.
That is the heart of the injustice unfolding already. And when our leaders have the solutions in hand and still delay, we allow them to make a choice on our behalf. We need to accept this central ethical question of who should bear the cost of our delay.
The same is true for the lack of action on nature. We recognise clearly that it is not enough to have detailed reports if there is nothing we are doing about it. Every day, the world reminds us that we don’t have time. While extinctions are a natural phenomenon, the extinctions have been occurring so quickly that ecosystems are struggling to recover, causing a domino effect, with one extinction prompting another. This has been devastating because biodiversity underpins all life on earth.
This is the challenge countries must confront as they gather in Yerevan, Armenia for the meeting of state parties to the UN Biodiversity Convention (COP17) to review progress on the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in 2022. The framework established an ambitious set of targets for 2030, and we are now at the halfway mark. For this it is important that we understand where we are, and what efforts are being made to reach the targets. While the scientists and the satellites tell us that amidst some signs of progress, e.g. on deforestation, there remains a real danger of us reaching catastrophic tipping points. In the same way that the independent Climate Action Tracker monitors climate change, we need a dedicated Nature Action Tracker to independently track and assess what countries are doing. It’s one thing to make commitments on nature; but it is crucial that we know what is actually happening on the ground.
Official data needs to account for all efforts, across all sectors, civil society and levels of government, so the cumulative results are visible and provide insights for learning and improvement. We simply don't have the time to wait for every country to learn how to do this or to overcome resistance. Setting targets in the end on what countries say they are going to do without them actually doing it leaves devastating gaps. When these efforts are assessed together, transparently and in the open, we can understand the cumulative results, identify what is working and what not.
Of course, measuring progress requires investment, reliable data and especially dedicated mechanisms that involve scientists, civil society and local communities. The people living closest to ecosystems are the ones who often have valuable knowledge about why certain things are changing. This does not leave out the private sector as they too have played a part in biodiversity loss and therefore, they must shoulder the responsibility of reversing this loss.
This week I attended the Villanova International Sustainability Conference at the Vatican in Rome and at Borgo Laudato Si' in Castel Gandolfo. It brought me back to Pope Francis's Laudato Si'. Written in 2015, it argued that the crisis we face is not several separate problems but one: the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor are the same cry. This message was again at the heart of the conference this week. The loss of a forest and the suffering of the communities who depend on it cannot be pulled apart.
Pope Francis called us to an ecological conversion, a change of heart as much as of policy, which is exactly what is missing and unethical? When we have the science and the solutions but still delay. What struck me most was the Laudato Si' Center for Higher Education, which is taking these words off the page and into action. Meeting Manuel Dorantes, its Executive Director, was a highlight of the visit, and to hear how the Center is unpacking the wisdom of the encyclical.
At Borgo Laudato Si', it is building a place dedicated to integral ecology, sustainability and a circular economy: to turn that wisdom into education and practice for a generation that will need both knowledge and conscience. It was also moving to see so many faith communities in the room, because they reach people and places that policy documents never will.
A dedicated mechanism to track our real-world action on nature is needed to know whether we are keeping our promises. But it takes a moral compass to make us want to. As countries gather in Yerevan, the question is no longer what we know, but what will it take to actually protect what sustains us and who we choose to protect? Laudato Si' reminds us that the answer was never hidden. We simply have to act on it.
Ms Mathai is the MD for Africa & Global Partnerships at the World Resources Institute and Chair of Wangari Maathai Foundation
