October 2026

Almost every country in the world has signed up to the same set of biodiversity targets, agreed in 2022 under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). Unlike the Aichi Targets before them, these come with a monitoring framework meant to show countries whether they're on track, and countries are now reporting their progress through their national reports. That gives us a first chance to look at how the framework is working in practice. It also raises a more basic question I've been thinking about for some time. Does it make sense to set sweeping targets at the global level, when conservation actually happens nationally and locally, and when none of the previous targets were completely met?

To explore this, I spoke with Alice Hughes, now Professor at the University of Melbourne, whose work sits where biodiversity science meets policy. Alice returns to the podcast to discuss whether the monitoring framework’s indicators can really measure what the targets set out to achieve, and whether we have enough data to act on. We also ask whether ambitious targets do more good than harm. Finally, we consider what the alternative to global targets would be, and how agreements like the GBF might be made more effective.

Link to resources

• The true scale of global wildlife trade is obscured by data gaps

• How networks and the Global Environment Facility can turn national reporting into lasting biodiversity monitoring capacity

• One Health, multiple gaps: Comparative analysis of global policies for zoonotic surveillance