One week before the start of the Fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP15) in Montreal, an alliance of German science and non-governmental organizations calls for an end to economic activities against nature in its "Frankfurt Declaration", which was published today. The Founding Director of the Leibniz Institute for Financial Research SAFE Jan Pieter Krahnen is also one of the initial signatories.
In their position paper, the organizations urge the German government and the European Union to ensure the success of the World Summit on Nature. At the same time, they offer concrete proposals to make a nature-friendly economy the standard. In doing so, they offer their expertise to solve the most urgent challenge facing humanity: the "twin crises" of biodiversity loss and climate change.
On the role of financial markets in the fight against climate change and biodiversity loss, Jan Krahnen comments as follows: "The Frankfurt Declaration provides supporting arguments for the position from a financial market perspective on the biodiversity issue for the World Summit on Nature in Montreal. Companies depend on reliable and clear rules, standardization, and timeframes to better plan their investments.
Accordingly, policymakers must take care of these rules, natural science must take care of the metrics, and financial markets must take care of allocating the necessary resources to address the long-term costs we face from biodiversity loss. This division of labor is hardly taken into account in the debate about how business and society can deal with the twin crises."
The signatories of the "Frankfurt Declaration" see Germany in a pioneering role: as the world's fourth-largest economy, the Federal Republic has an enormous "biodiversity footprint." According to the declaration, the global value chains of German companies have a considerable impact on nature and in many cases contribute to its destruction. Moreover, according to the declaration, there is hardly a country with a greater wealth of scientific knowledge, comprehensive biodiversity data, and ambitious initiatives for global nature conservation.
The Alliance that signed the "Frankfurt Declaration" includes Senckenberg – Leibniz Institution for Biodiversity and Earth System Research, the Natural History Museum Berlin, the Leibniz Institute for the Analysis of Biodiversity Change, the ESMT European School of Management and Technology Berlin, FUTURE Institute for Sustainable Transformation, the Leibniz Institute SAFE, the Frankfurt Zoological Society, and Campaign for Nature.
Scientific Contact
Prof. Dr. Jan Pieter Krahnen
Founding Director emeritus
