Assessing coverage of the monitoring framework of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and opportunities to fill gaps

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is the most ambitious multilateral agreement on biodiversity to date. It calls for a whole-of-government and whole-of-society approach to halt and reverse biodiversity loss worldwide. The GBF’s monitoring framework lays out how Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are expected to report on their progress. An expert group convened by the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group (AHTEG) on Indicators, provided guidance on its implementation, including a gap analysis to identify the strengths and limitations of the indicators in the monitoring framework. We present the results of the AHTEG gap analysis and provide recommendations on implementing and improving monitoring of the GBF. We compare three implementation scenarios, from worst-case to best-case: (1) Parties only report on required headline and binary indicators; (2) Parties also report on all headline indicator disaggregations and (3) Parties additionally report on all optional component and complementary indicators. In each case, the monitoring framework covers (1) between 19–40%, (2) 22–41% and (3) 29–47% of the elements in the GBF’s goals and targets. Even in the best-case scenario (3), no indicators are available for 12% of the GBF’s elements. In practice, the coverage and thus effectiveness of the monitoring framework will depend on which indicators (required and optional) and disaggregations countries apply. Substantial investment is required to collect the necessary data to compute indicators, infer change and effectively monitor progress. We highlight important next steps to progressively improve the efficacy of the monitoring framework.