TIPC’s Co-Director, Matías Ramírez, will be travelling as a delegate to the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP 16) for the Convention on Biological Diversity beginning on October 20th in Cali, Colombia. Once there, he will share a platform with a series of speakers on a panel session titled ‘Building Bridges to Implement the New Biodiversity Plan’.
At COP 16, he will present a report recently published by TIPC’s Latin American and Caribbean hub in collaboration with the Wyss Academy for Nature which argues that, over the past 100 years, industrial scale logging, agriculture and energy production has locked the Amazon into a “system of deforestation” which if left unchecked will hit a ‘tipping point’ beyond which wide-scale ecosystem collapse becomes inevitable with devastating consequences for people, biodiversity and the global climate.
The report argues that existing “system optimization” approaches may not be sufficient to reverse this and it is necessary to construct new transformative pathways. These incorporate profound changes in how the socio-ecological and socio-technical systems of the Amazon are managed, being rooted in a deep understanding of its different ecological realities and the livelihoods of local communities that live there. This is critical to support the implementation of existing regulatory controls on deforestation and the use of new technologies that can help to support biodiversity.
Examples of this “place-based” approach include women artisan miners working to reduce the damage of gold mining in local rivers, the need for greater support for communities of Brazil nuts collectors whose livelihoods depend on healthy forests, and farmers adopting syntropic agriculture methods which involve regenerating soils as part of production for local consumption. These initiatives can be seen as “incipient systemic change practices,” that can break the existing lock-in to deforestation if replicated.
Matías Ramírez meets with women miners and Brazil nut growers in Puerto Maldonado, Peru, in 2024
This COP will be the first time representatives of national government, NGOs, policymakers and other key stakeholders will come together in this format since global biodiversity targets were adopted as part of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in December 2022. The invitation for TIPC researchers to attend reflects the positive contribution the Latin American HUB of the Transformative Innovation Policy Consortium is making to debates on biodiversity from the perspective of transformative innovation, especially the work undertaken on place-based alternatives and system change in the Peruvian Amazon area.
The work of TIPC builds on that of other researchers who argue for the building of bridges between scientific innovation, policy reform, and community-driven solutions that underscores the critical importance of collective action, local empowerment, and innovative policies in combating deforestation.
To read more, you can access the full publication here as well as a Spanish- and an English-language Research Brief.
