GBF-aligned NBSAPS to ensure just, sustainable futures for all life to thrive:
The African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) is committed to dismantling inequalities and resisting corporate industrial expansion in Africa’s food and agriculture systems.
The ACB gratefully acknowledges the financial support of several donors, though the views expressed may not necessarily reflect the views of our donors.
November 2025
About this series
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), was developed to address plummeting biodiversity and to maintain ecological integrity globally. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF or GBF), adopted in 2022, replaces previous iterations of global obligations, goals and targets. As countries prepare to submit their GBF-aligned National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans (NBSAPs) and National Targets ahead of the seventeenth Conference of the Parties (COP 17) of the CBD to be held in Armenia in October 2026, civil society must be aware and prepared to engage in the lead-up, implementation and monitoring processes.
Africa’s exceptional biodiversity is under severe threat by inter alia urbanisation, industrial agricultural expansion, land degradation, habitat loss, and climate change – all inherently linked to extractive land use. Similarly, elsewhere, progress on the continent to meet global biodiversity targets has been meagre, with biodiversity loss continuously on the rise.
In this series of papers leading up to COP 17, GBF-aligned NBSAPs to ensure just, sustainable futures for all life to thrive: the role of African civil society, we aim to inform ourselves, as African civil society, to firstly shape national strategies, plans, and indicators, to ensure they are relevant and meaningful on the ground and, secondly, to be able to ensure accountability in implementation and progress towards meeting the 23 targets of the GBF so that these are carried out in the interests of African societies, ecosystems, and futures.
As we go on this journey collectively, we will unpack the GBF goals, targets, and other relevant sections to which NBSAPs are being revised and aligned in the intersection of agriculture and biodiversity, and how transformational change will be required at each level.
In this, the first in the series, we explore what an NBSAP is, what the current status is, and the potential they provide for renewed ambition to ensure our collective survival. Ultimately, it is vital that African voices and realities feature as part of the planning, implementation, and monitoring of the GBF at the national levels, to ensure that we move towards a just and sustainable world, where all life can thrive.
Overview of National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans (NBSAPs) Factsheet
Background to NBSAPs
The CBD, adopted in 1992, is the overarching multilateral environmental agreement developed in response to global biodiversity loss. Article 6 of the CBD creates the obligation for national biodiversity planning.1 Linked to this, Article 26 calls for Parties to the CBD to present, through their national reports, information on measures which have been taken for the implementation of the provisions of the Convention and their effectiveness in meeting the objectives of the Convention, and Article 10(a) encourages Parties to integrate consideration of the conservation and sustainable use of biological resources into national decision-making.
A national strategy, therefore, reflects how a country intends to fulfil the objectives of the Convention in light of specific national circumstances, and how the related action plans will constitute the sequence of steps to be taken to meet these goals.
The Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, adopted at the tenth Conference of the Parties (COP 10) held in Nagoya, Japan (December 2010),2 set out 20 targets, known as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. Parties were encouraged to use this as an overarching framework to guide plans and implementation at the national level (Maney et al., 2024). NBSAPs became the principal national level mechanism for monitoring biodiversity, formalised under Aichi Target 17. Following the end of the 2011-2020 period, the Aichi Targets were succeeded by a new framework, the KM-GBF.
The NBSAPs, therefore, are the core planning documents at the national level. They outline a country’s specific strategies and action plans to meet the obligations and targets of the CBD and, more recently, the GBF. A country’s NBSAP is the primary instrument for implementation at the national level, guiding national policy, integrating targets, and defining actions. The GBF and prior frameworks like the Aichi Targets provide the global goals and targets that the NBSAP translates into national priorities and plans, thereby guiding the entire process of biodiversity conservation and management and the implementation of the CBD. In addition, Parties to the CBD must submit periodic national reports to the CBD Secretariat. They serve as a monitoring and reporting tool to assess the effectiveness of implemented measures and track progress towards achieving national and global targets.
Parties to the CBD are obliged to submit National Reports on measures taken towards the implementation of the commitments in their NBSAPs, as well as the effectiveness of the measures taken in reaching targets. The most recent such reports due were the Sixth National Reports, submitted by 164 Parties by January 2020. In the lead up to COP 17, to be held in October 2026 in Armenia, according to decision 15/6, Parties are required to submit revised NBSAPs, including national targets, and the draft template for the seventh and eighth national reports. In the same decision, it requested Parties to submit their seventh national report by 28 February 2026. The seventh national reports will be a primary source of information for the global review of the implementation of the GBF at COP 17. As such, every Party is required to revise its NBSAP so that the national targets, indicators, and financing pathways map onto those 4 goals and 23 GBF targets.
2 See the NBSAP status of countries here: https://www.cbd.int/doc/ nbsap/nbsap-status.doc
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework
The KM-GBF was adopted in 2022, during the COP 15, under decision 15/4.3 The GBF sets out pathways to reach the global vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050. It includes four goals and 23 targets to be implemented by 2050, with specific goals for 2030, and features a comprehensive monitoring framework to track progress. 4
The GBF replaces the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 and its Aichi Targets, which largely failed in terms of meeting their 2020 deadline (discussed further below). Therefore, the GBF builds on Aichi targets and intends to learn from these failures, with an increasingly urgent need for more ambitious and effective strategies to combat accelerating biodiversity loss. See Annexes 1 and 2 for the goals and targets of the GBF.
Following COP 10, 179 Parties submitted NBSAPs, including 45 African countries. In terms of reporting, only 24 Sixth National Reports are available from Africa. 5 As of October 2025, 57 countries had submitted revised NBSAPs, of which 10 African countries had submitted their GBF-aligned NBSAPs.6
Countries with at least one National Target
Countries that have set National Targets for every GBF target
Countries that have set National Targets for more than 75% of the GBF targets
number of National Targets
Figure 1: Summary of national targets set by African countries in the lead-up to COP 17
In terms of National Targets, 49 countries in Africa have set at least one national target, 33 countries in Africa have set national targets for every GBF target, 44 countries have set National Targets for more than 75% of the GBF targets, and the average number of national targets being set by countries is 21, as illustrated in Figure 1. In addition, 39 countries from Africa have elements of Section C7 that have been considered when developing their National Targets.8,9
5 See more information at the Clearing-House Mechanism (CHM) here.
7 Section C outlines considerations for the implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework includes: Contribution and rights of indigenous peoples and local communities; different value systems; whole-ofgovernment and whole-of-society approach; national circumstances, priorities and capabilities, collective effort towards the targets; right to development; human rights-based approach; gender; fulfilment of the three objectives of the Convention and its Protocols and their balanced implementation; consistency with international agreements or instruments; principles of the Rio Declaration; science and innovation; ecosystem approach; intergenerational equity; formal and informal education; access to financial resources; cooperation and synergies; biodiversity and health.
8 See online reporting tool here
9 To check NBSAP and National Target status: https://wwf.panda.org/act/nbsap_tracker_check_your_countrys_nature_ progress/
Lessons from Aichi: progress, failures,
and concerns
According to the Fifth Global Biodiversity Outlook Report (GB05), none of the Aichi targets were fully achieved at the global level, with six partially met (CBD, 2020). Several factors contributed to the framework’s shortcomings, including vague targets that were difficult to measure, a lack of defined metrics, overly ambitious goals, limited country ambition, inadequate financing, and no mandatory reporting (Nature, 2020).
Overall progress towards achieving the Aichi Biodiversity Targets in African countries generally matched global trends. Africa, with its rich and extensive biodiversity, remains vital in terms of addressing biodiversity loss, in particular, as it faces unprecedented urbanisation, agrifood industrialisation (including fisheries), deforestation, land degradation, and habitat loss, all exacerbated by climate change (UNEP-WCMC, 2016). Africa’s circumstances create unique challenges, requiring financial and knowledge exchanges and support, while ensuring national sovereignty and involvement of local actors in decision making, and ensuring equity and accessibility to retain local cultures and livelihoods. Linked to this, up-to-date baseline information is required for the monitoring frameworks of the KMGBF.
According to the 2016 State of Biodiversity in Africa report (UNEP-WCMC, 2016), the only progress made to achieve the Aichi targets was the policy focus in Targets 16 and 17, i.e., ratifying the Nagoya Protocol, and producing revised NBSAPs. In some cases, there was limited progress, while in others, there was a worsening of the situation.
Data gaps, insufficient funding, legislative fragmentation and limited local participation in decision-making and governance require immediate attention as we enter a new, more ambitious era for reducing biodiversity loss and restoring degraded ecosystems.
As articulated in Maney et al. (2024:1), NBSAPs are unwieldy in nature, idiosyncratic in format, and inaccessible to analyse – especially between Parties – as there is no standardisation in the structure. They tend to be laid out in consistent hierarchical structures, presented in unstandardised tabular formats or simply as lists. National Reports do not necessarily reference NBSAPs directly, which often makes relating their contents to the relevant NBSAP challenging. For most reporting Parties, the commitments reported do not match actions, objectives, or even targets in their NBSAPs. Due to the lack of a formal monitoring mechanism to date, overall progress in delivering planned actions in NBSAPS largely remains unknown.
The GBF aims to learn from this experience by establishing a monitoring framework to measure progress, by linking the outcomes of the framework to measurable indicators.10 This is a vital step to hold countries accountable to their own plans, standardising formats to make monitoring progress simpler, in terms of how NBSAPs align with the GBF, and how progress was made to achieve the GBF and national plans overall.
The monitoring framework is structured according to five types of indicators designed to track progress towards the goals and targets of the GBF (Affinito et al., 2025). These indicators include headline11 and binary12 indicators (which Parties are required to report on), component and complementary indicators13 (which are optional), and additional nationally relevant indicators that Parties may choose.
An enhanced monitoring system, such as the one planned for GBF, using harmonised planning and reporting data that brings in multiple lines of input data, could enhance transparency and accountability in the national implementation of commitments to biodiversity. It could also enable targeted interventions from Parties to prevent certain national targets and pledged commitments from being unreported on, resulting in flawed and inadequate reporting outcomes (Maney et al., 2024). Importantly, engaging broader sectors and stakeholders is crucial to effective monitoring and implementation (Maney et al., 2024).
The GBF’s monitoring framework lays out how Parties to the CBD are expected to report on their progress. Yet, currently, even in best-case scenarios, no indicators are available for 12% of the GBF’s elements (Affinito et al., 2025), and ultimately, much will depend on the degree to which Parties implement the monitoring framework. Indicators in the monitoring framework must be able to address the urgent need to ensure transformation takes place.
10 Convention on Biological Diversity. Monitoring Framework for the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. (2022).
11 Headline indicators are quantitative measures of process or outcomes relevant to each goal or target. There are 26 headline indicators in the monitoring framework spread across the four goals and 15 of the 23 targets.
12 Binary indicators are qualitative measures of the efforts made by Parties to deliver on the GBF. These indicators are compiled from a set of questions to be answered by Parties and aimed at understanding the progress made towards implementing measures, processes and legislation to deliver on the ambition of the GBF.
13 Component and complementary indicators help monitor progress made towards the goals and targets beyond the information provided by the headline and binary indicators. Currently, 55 component and 124 complementary indicators are spread across all of the goals and targets. Component indicators are intended to cover elements of the goals and targets that are not covered by headline or binary indicators. Complementary indicators support a more in-depth thematic analysis of the goals and targets.
Revising NBSAPs and National Targets in Africa: transformative change through structural change
Currently, most NBSAPs pre-date the GBF and therefore targets, indicators, and timelines must be revised to align with the GBF’s Goals and Targets, in the lead-up to COP 17. As such, civil society organisations must engage in this process.
It is vital that effective monitoring and data are available for African countries to guide biodiversity planning. Furthermore, as many of the targets extend across sectors and governance structures, effective support is required to ensure policy coherence, such as inter alia the environment, tourism, agriculture, and mining sectors. Mainstreaming biodiiversity must be done through setting clear cross-cutting and sector-specific legislation to ensure commitments are legislated for implementation. As we go through the various targets, goals and sections, then such legislative measures will be unpacked (UNEP 2018).
NBSAPs must include the entire range of biodiversity related multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), namely the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS), the Convention on Wetlands (Ramsar Convention), the Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (World Heritage Convention), the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) and the International Plant Protection Convention. Previous assessments in Post2010 NBSAPs showed little integration of these in NBSAPs, while some NBSAPs include broad statements on better coherence among MEAs. A few countries’ NBSAPs explicitly refer to synergising implementation of the biodiversity-related Conventions with a general intent to do so such as Bahrain, Belgium, Cameroon, Georgia, Guyana, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Nepal, the Republic of Korea and the United Republic of Tanzania (UNEP, 2018).
Unlike previous iterations, resource moblisation forms part of the KM-GBF, under Target 20. Yet, funding shortfalls are expected to continue, despite the establishment of a Global Biodiversity Framework Fund.14 How and where finance is provided must be monitored to ensure all targets receive adequate financing to ensure their implementation and realisation, and meet the overall goals of the CBD. A variety of projects and programmes exist to address previous challenges, including The Global Biodiversity Framework Early Action Support (GBF-EAS) project,15 the Biodiversity Finance Initiative (BIOFIN),16 the Umbrella Programme to Support NBSAP Update and the Seventh National Reports,17 and the NBSAP Accelerator Partnership.18
15 Provides technical and financial packages for rapid GBF alignment, national monitoring, policy coherence and biodiversity finance. 139 developing countries (including 45 African states) receive support to update NBSAPs and prepare Seventh National Reports. https://www.undp.org/sites/g/files/zskgke326/files/2025-04/gbf-eas-brochureen.pdf
18 Country led network that matches technical financial requests with donors, shares best practice templates, and monitors progress on GBF targets. 46 African members (≈ 30% of the continent) actively exchanging updates and receiving matchmaking support. https://nbsapaccelerator.org/
Transformative change is required to respond to global environmental challenges and crises, including biodiversity loss, climate change, and pollution (IPBES, 2024). Promoting and accelerating transformative change is essential to meeting the 23 action-oriented global targets and the four goals of the GBF by 2030 and for achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity, the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and its Sustainable Development Goals, and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The IPBES report (2024) outlines what actions are required as well as how they must be done to achieve transformative change. Ultimately, the NBSAPs, which are the main instrument for implementing the CBD, offer important avenues to transform governance systems to be effective and transformative in terms of implementing their obligations under the CBD (See Table 5.2 in IPBES, 2025).
As countries move towards COP 17, we must ensure that NBSAPs are used as an instrument to galvanise action around transformative change.
That said, no single strategy, specific list of actions, or unique pathway brings about transformative change in all contexts. Transformative change is iterative, complex, contested, collective, and context specific (IPBES, 2025). For the GBF and revised NBSAPs to meet their ambitious and transformational agenda, they must address the structural changes required (Steichen, 2025). This requires addressing the underlying causes of biodiversity destruction, reproducing inequitable, neocolonial, and profit-seeking short-term benefits for few, over long-term, collective well-being.
Conclusion
It is important that African civil society engages in biodiversity planning in terms of the development of NBSAPs, supports their implementation, and monitoring to feed into National Reports. This must include, inter alia, ensuring
The NBSAPs have a transformational agenda and orientation.
Active participation of all relevant actors in the design, implementation and monitoring of NBSAPs;
All goals, targets and Sections (in particular Section C) of the GBF are addressed in NBSAPs;
The development of relevant national indicators are included in their NBSAPs and national monitoring frameworks;
Sector-specific actions and legislation be developed to guide effective implementation of GBF-aligned NBSAPs.
References to other relevant MEAs is included in NBSAPs.
Adequate resources are made available to ensure the successful implementation of all goals and targets of the GBF. In this regard, a crucial task is to distinguish between strategies that advance structural change and those that further entrench the status quo, such as debt, harmful subsidies, tax evasion by the private sector, etc.
References
Affinito, F., Butchart, S.H.M., Nicholson, E. et al. Assessing coverage of the monitoring framework of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and opportunities to fill gaps. Nat Ecol Evol 9, 1280–1294 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-025-02718-3
Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992. https://www.cbd.int/doc/legal/cbd-en.pdf
Convention on Biological Diversity, 2020, Global Biodiversity Outlook 5, Montreal. https://www.cbd.int/gbo5
IPBES (2024). Thematic Assessment Report on the Underlying Causes of Biodiversity Loss and the Determinants of Transformative Change and Options for Achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services. O’ Brien, K., Garibaldi, L., and Agrawal, A. (eds.). IPBES Secretariat, Bonn, Germany. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11382215
Maney, C., Guaras, D., Harrison, J., et al. 2024. National commitments to Aichi Targets and their implications for monitoring the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. npj Biodiversity. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44185-024-00039-5
Nature., 2020, The United Nations must get its new biodiversity targets right, Nature 578, 337–338. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00450-5.pdf
Steichen, L., 2025. Transform, not reform: Transformative change to stop the biodiversity crisis. Third World Network, The Climate and Community Institute, and The Centre for Climate Justice. https://wp.twnnews.net/sendpress/eyJpZCI6IjU3MzQwIiwicmVwb3J0IjoiOTMwOCIsInZpZXciOiJ0cmFja2VyIiwidXJsIjoiaHR0cHM6XC9cL3d3dy50d24ubXlcL3RpdGxlMlwvYnJpZWZpbmdfcGFwZXJzXC90d25cL1RyYW5zZm9ybWF0aXZlJTIwY2hhbmdlJTIwVFdOQlAlMjBPY3QlMjAyMDI1JTIwU3RlaWNoZW4ucGRmIn0/
UNEP, 2018. Assessment of post-2010 National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans, Nairobi, Kenya
UNEP-WCMC, 2016. The State of Biodiversity in Africa: A mid-term review of progress towards the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. UNEP-WCMC, Cambridge, UK.
