Making the post-2020 global biodiversity framework a successful tool for building biodiverse, inclusive, resilient and safe food systems for all

By Anja Gassner, Philip Dobie, Rhett Harrison, Adriana Vidal, Eduardo Somarriba, Francois Pythoud, Chetan Kumar, Yves Laumonier, Ashwini Chhatre
Environmental Research Letters | September 2020

DOI

doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abae2b

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Citation

Gassner, Anja., Dobie, Philip., Harrison, Rhett., Vidal, Adriana., Somarriba, Eduardo., Pythoud, Francois., Kumar, Chetan., Laumonier, Yves., Chhatre, Ashwini. Making the post-2020 global biodiversity framework a successful tool for building biodiverse, inclusive, resilient and safe food systems for all Environmental Research Letters doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/abae2b.

Environmental Research Letters, 2020

Abstract

COVID-19 has exposed the vulnerability of our economies to shocks, and it has laid bare deepinequalities in our society that threaten to derail the Sustainable Development Goals. Governmentsaround the world are looking for recovery options that deliver new jobs and businesses. Few sectorslink job creation so closely to sustainable green production as the food sector. It is the largestsource of employment in many countries in the global South. At the same time cities depend uponimported food that is produced in far-away countries and shipped around the world. The trillionsof dollars to be invested in recovery from COVID-19 offers an unprecedented opportunity for aclean, green and just transition to a more biodiversity-friendly agricultural and food system. Keyamong the political opportunities to shift the post-pandemic world towards sustainability andresilience are the ongoing deliberations of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. ThePost-2020 Framework will be the precedent for national governments to bridge economic actionwith the key need for a green, resilient recovery. The United Nations Convention on BiologicalDiversity (CBD) has traditionally seen agriculture as one of the biggest threats to biodiversity andhas been actively promoting the protection of natural ecosystems by concentrating its efforts onpreventing further expansion of agriculture. But it has not explicitly recognized the importance ofmixed, diverse agricultural landscapes for their contribution to the conservation of wildbiodiversity. The CBD has an opportunity to bring its influence to bear on international policyfavouring investments in local production and marketing capacity to replace imported food andbeverages. This will contribute to both COVID-19 recovery through creation of rural jobs andincome and empowering governments and consumers to support diverse, mixed agriculturalsystems that conserve and enhance biodiversity as well as reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Ashwini Chhatre is an Associate Professor of Public Policy and currently serves as the Executive Director of the Bharti Institute of Public Policy (BIPP) at the Indian School of Business (ISB). Professor Chhatre is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research interests broadly centre on the dynamic cross-scale interactions between governance, economic development, and environmental protection. He relocated to India from the US in 2014 to join the faculty at the Indian School of Business, Hyderabad. He spent 13 years in the US, including five in graduate school at Duke University, where he was awarded a PhD in Political Science. In 2006-07, Professor Chhatre became the first Giorgio Ruffolo Post-doctoral Fellow in Sustainability Science at Harvard University, before joining the Department of Geography and Geographic Information Science at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

Between completing his BA in Economics from the University of Delhi in 1990 and starting his PhD at Duke University, he spent 11 years working in different parts of India, primarily as a community organiser and social activist on issues related to natural resources such as land, forests, and water. A background in Economics, graduate training in Political Science, and a long-standing engagement with scholarship in Geography, Anthropology, Landscape Ecology, and Environmental History ensure that his research is never confined to a single discipline.

Professor Chhatre’s main research interests lie in exploring the intersection of democracy, environment, and development, with a focus on decentralised forest governance, climate change vulnerability and adaptation, and multifunctional agriculture. Over the past 20 years, the scope of his research projects has ranged from household-level to global analysis, consistently bridging research, policy, and practice.

He was the founding Editor-in-Chief of World Development Perspectives (2016-19), served as Senior Editor of Conservation Letters (2009-2014), and has published one book and several articles in leading journals including Science, and PNAS.

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Ashwini Chhatre