Farming and biodiversity: Challenges, commitments, and opportunities

Biodiversity is essential to farming. It provides important services like pollination, pest control, water storage, and climate regulation, which are critical for productivity and resilience.

Agriculture has been very successful in feeding a growing world population, but at a cost. Land conversion and land use for crops and pasture, freshwater extraction for irrigation, and pollution from fertilizers and pesticides have made farming the leading driver of biodiversity loss.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is expected to reshape farming, as signatory governments are required to develop and implement new national policies to halt and reverse biodiversity loss. Food and agribusiness companies embracing GBF goals are increasingly embedding nature-related risks and impacts in their sustainability strategies, including providing opportunities for farmers to access support and improve their resilience.

These public and private initiatives can create financial opportunities for farmers through subsidies, corporate programs, and emerging markets for biodiversity credits and ecosystem services payments.