Nature’s targets run on the wrong clock

This is article 3 in the On Biological Time series. Here is article 2.

Four years to 2030

The UN Biodiversity Conference, COP17, meets in Yerevan from 19 to 30 October. Its central task is to judge whether nearly two hundred countries are on track to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, the mission set by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in December 2022, and to close the finance gap that stands between the targets and their delivery.

There are four years left. Four years is a long time in a negotiating text and a short time almost anywhere else. It is about the length of a political term, or of a typical fund’s investment period, and not quite long enough for a coconut palm planted today to bear its first meaningful harvest.

That last comparison is not decoration. It is the subject of this essay.

A framework that deserves its ambition

The framework is ambitious and carefully built, and it is worth saying so before saying anything else. It asks countries to conserve 30 per cent of land, waters and seas, to restore degraded ecosystems, and to ensure that areas under agriculture, aquaculture, fisheries and forestry are managed sustainably. It asks large companies and financial institutions to regularly monitor, assess and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies and impacts on biodiversity across their operations, supply chains and portfolios.

It also puts money behind the words. Target 19 aims to mobilise $200 billion a year for biodiversity from all sources, and Target 18 aims to reduce harmful incentives by at least $500 billion a year. Few international agreements have tried to tie nature to finance this directly, and the delegates in Yerevan inherit real tools.

What the framework counts

Every one of those targets is reported in units that a ministry can count: hectares under protection, hectares under a management plan, practices adopted, money mobilised and disclosures filed. These are the right units for the job they were designed to do, and the countries meeting in Yerevan will use them honestly.

But a hectare has no age in any of those units. A hectare of smallholder coconut planted in 1965 and a hectare planted in 2015 count exactly the same towards a target. One is in the final stretch of its productive life while the other has decades ahead of it, and on the report they are identical.

Long-term productivity is a matter of age

Target 10 is the one that touches the land that feeds people, and it uses a phrase that deserves more attention than it gets: the resilience and long-term efficiency and productivity of these production systems. Long-term productivity is not a property of area. It is a property of time.

A perennial landscape carries its future inside the age structure of what is planted on it. An estate where most of the trees went in during the same decade will rise together, peak together and decline together, and no management plan changes that sequence once the trees are in the ground. It can only be anticipated, and replanted ahead of the fall.

In the Philippines, around one in five coconut trees is classified as senile, and the Department of Agriculture reports that an ageing palm yields around forty nuts a year against an optimal hundred and twenty.¹ In Indonesia, around 2.4 million hectares of smallholder palm are past their productive age.² Both countries are managing these landscapes and both run national replanting programmes, yet neither problem registers as a failure against any biodiversity target, because the targets were never asked to read the clock.

The steward is on the same clock

The landscape is not the only thing ageing. The people who hold the knowledge of how to manage it are ageing too.

Indonesia’s 2023 agricultural census found that farmers aged 55 to 64 rose from 20 per cent of the total to more than 23 per cent in a decade, while those over 64 rose from under 13 per cent to more than 16 per cent. The number of individual farm holdings fell by more than two million over the same period.³

The framework rightly emphasises the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities as stewards of biodiversity. What it cannot record is that a large share of those stewards will not be farming in 2040, and that much of what they know about their own ground has no successor waiting to receive it.

What I have watched on the ground

I have spent fifteen years living inside smallholder communities in Indonesia and the Philippines, after a first career in investment banking. In that time I have watched landscapes that would satisfy any management plan on paper move steadily towards the end of their productive lives, with nothing in the reporting that surrounds them changing at all.

Calendar time and biological time

There are two clocks running in Yerevan, and only one of them is in the room.

Calendar time is the clock of targets, reporting cycles and conferences. It moves in years and is reset every time a new deadline is agreed. Biological time is the clock of the organism. It moves in cohorts and generations, and it does not reset. A tree planted in a given decade reaches the end of its productive life in a given decade, whatever the negotiating text says.

The Philippines offers the clearest illustration. Its government has doubled its 2026 coconut replanting target to 50 million trees, one of the most ambitious perennial planting efforts anywhere in the world, and every one of those trees will reach its first meaningful harvest some years after 2030.⁴ The policy is right and the timing is the best that biology allows, and still none of its productive benefit can appear inside the window that the framework is measuring.

When the two clocks agree, a framework works well. When they diverge, the framework continues to report progress while the ground underneath it moves on its own schedule. That is not a flaw in anyone’s diligence. It is a question of what the instrument was built to measure.

Finance follows the units

This matters most where the money flows. The $200 billion a year that Target 19 seeks will be allocated, tracked and reported against the same units as the targets themselves: hectares, practices, projects and disclosures. Capital goes where it can be counted, and what cannot be counted tends to go without.

So a restoration programme that brings degraded land under management scores well, as it should. A productive landscape whose trees and stewards are both approaching the end of their working lives, and which has never been degraded in any measurable sense, may not register as needing anything at all until its output starts to fall.

The disclosure that comes back clean

This is where the framework meets the boardroom. Under Target 15, companies are increasingly asked to disclose their dependencies on nature, and many already do so in good faith. A food company can state, accurately, that it depends on coconut, palm or cocoa sourced from a given region, produced under a given standard, on a given number of hectares.

All of it can be true, and all of it can come back clean, on a supply base that is several years from the start of a decline that no disclosure template asks about. The dependency is real and so is the risk; the instrument simply has no field for age.

What Yerevan could ask

None of this argues against the framework, which already asks the right question in Target 10 and simply has no unit in which to answer it. It argues for reading the framework alongside a second clock.

The questions for the delegates in Yerevan, and for the companies and investors who will be shaped by what they decide, are simple to state and hard to answer. How much of the land counted towards our 2030 targets will still be productive in 2040? Which of our dependencies on nature carry an expiry date that no report records? Who, in any of our institutions, is responsible for knowing what time it is on the ground?

The targets will be met or missed in calendar time, and the land will keep its own.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the opinions of leading Sustainability Thought Leaders, their views do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

The world needs sustainability knowledge. At illuminem, no interest group or shareholder can influence our work. Thank you for supporting our mission to make high-quality and independent sustainability information free for all. Every contribution helps. Thank you for donating today.