At the closing ceremony of the High-level Segment of the 14th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP14) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2018, the Republic of Egypt, the People’s Republic of China and the CBD Secretariat teamed up to launch the Sharm El-Sheikh Action Agenda for Nature and People (the “Action Agenda”). Hosted on an online platform, the Action Agenda receives and showcases concrete commitments and contributions to biodiversity from non-state actors across all sectors, including local authorities/governments, enterprises, social organizations, research institutes, local communities, and individuals, among others.
The Action Agenda is a mechanism that aims to raise public awareness, catalyze a groundswell of actions from all sectors and stakeholders, encourage non-state actors to take actions, help accelerate the transformations in support of biodiversity conservation and its sustainable use, link actions of state and non-state actors to their political processes and finally achieve the global goals and targets of the Convention. It also contributes to the formulation and implementation of the “Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework” (the “post-2020 Framework”, and complements other relevant international environmental agreements, in a bid to stem and reverse biodiversity loss; meanwhile, it could support non-state actor activities to have a measurable impact and facilitate changes.
