Making the Monitoring Framework of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework fit for purpose

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is the most ambitious agreement on biodiversity conservation and sustainable use to date. It calls for a whole-of- society approach aimed at halting and reversing the loss of biodiversity worldwide. To support its implementation, the Monitoring Framework of the GBF lays out how Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity are expected to report their progress. Given the need for capacity-building and investment to operationalize the Monitoring Framework, Parties established an expert group to provide guidance on its implementation, including a gap analysis to identify the strengths and limitations of the Monitoring Framework. We present the results of the gap analysis, highlight where more work on the Monitoring Framework is needed and provide recommendations on implementing and improving it to allow effective and comprehensive tracking of progress across all elements of the GBF’s Goals and Targets. We find that using required indicators (headline and binary), the Monitoring Framework fully covers 20% of the Goals’ and Targets’ elements and partially covers an additional 42%. Including optional (component and complementary) indicators improves full coverage to 24% and an additional 49% partial coverage. For 13% of elements, no indicators are available. While the Monitoring Framework will enable progress towards meeting the Goals and Targets of the GBF, substantial investment is still required to collect the necessary data to compute indicators, infer change, and effectively monitor progress. We highlight both immediate and long-term solutions and offer guidance on important next steps that will progressively improve the efficacy of the Monitoring Framework.