Master's thesis (2026)
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) asks Parties to contribute to addressing global biodiversity loss in accordance with national circumstances, priorities, and capabilities, but offers no method for judging what a fair and proportional contribution would be.
At present, country contributions to implementing the KMGBF are voluntary commitments, meaning that contributions are unlikely to align either with the total effort required to fulfill the framework, or with fair allocation principles. Here, we present an approach and accompanying tool that make the fairness choices behind contributions explicit by varying the weight given to each principle, for three targets: biodiversity finance (Target 19), protected areas (Target 3), and
sustainable consumption (Target 16). We apply fairness principles including economic capacity, impact on biodiversity, and development need, drawn from effort-sharing literature and a survey of international conservation researchers. The proportion of total effort a country is asked to bear depends heavily on the principles considered: moving between single principles relocates 47– 49% of the total. Counting only the impacts a country drives overseas is almost as consequential,
reallocating 36% and raising the share attributed to high-income countries from 21% to 44%. For Target 3, more than half of the cost of protected area expansion is allocated to countries that would not host the new protection. Rather than prescribing a single fair allocation, this approach makes explicit the trade-offs among fairness principles, offering a basis for Parties to situate their own priorities and consider how they might contribute most effectively and fairly to global
biodiversity recovery.
