By Kevin Lunzalu
Tell me it’s 1992 without saying it? The birth of the Rio Conventions. A time when the world came together and agreed to jointly address biodiversity loss, climate change, and desertification, on the collective understanding that the then-growing ecological crisis was not only becoming global in scale, but its implications were increasingly economically and socio-culturally fatal for existing and future generations. Millions of years before the Earth Summit, a simple but very powerful tool of bringing life in ecosystems existed. It was natural regeneration.
Thirty-four years later, the world has convened again, this time to assess the science and evidence needed to address biodiversity loss and its key drivers effectively. Taking the form of the 28th meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-28) and the 7th Meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI-7), the midterm review of the implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) should be utilized as a moment for the world to collectively rethink nature’s technologies that have greatly been sidelined in the ongoing deliberations.
Science has shown us that the ocean is the Earth’s largest life-support system. However, negotiations under Agenda Items 5 (synthetic biology) and 8 (marine and coastal biodiversity) reveal a critical imbalance in the CBD’s scientific and review framework. Under item 5, considerable negotiation time is spent on exploring risks, prospects, and supporting capacity and development, access to and transfer of technology, and knowledge-sharing in the context of synthetic biology. Under item 8, much of the meeting’s attention is on ecologically or biologically significant marine areas and the conservation and sustainable use of marine and coastal biodiversity. As at the start of the SBSTTA-28 meeting, the term ‘regenerative’ did not appear in the non-papers of either agenda item, indicating an alarming disconnect between ‘modern technologies’ and what is really needed to restore degraded ocean ecosystems—natural regeneration effectively.
While most modern technologies focus on engineering species and genetic-level organisms, readily available, cost-effective, and community-facing natural regeneration mechanisms can restore entire ecosystems—rebuilding habitat-forming species, trophic interactions, hydrological connectivity, dependent livelihoods, and ecological resilience. Countries should converge around this ecological form of ecosystem engineering as an effective alternative to the molecular redesigns proposed by corporations.
In all its forms, natural regeneration has already supported vast existing ecological evidence, aligning perfectly with the precautionary approach under the CBD, while reviving biodiversity and addressing the climate crisis.
