By Kevin Lunzalu-Shoshin, African CSOs Biodiversity Alliance (ACBA)
Tell me it is 1992 without saying it.
That was the year the world gathered at the Rio Earth Summit and established the foundations for global cooperation on some of humanity’s greatest environmental challenges. The birth of the Rio Conventions represented a collective recognition that biodiversity loss, climate change, and land degradation were no longer isolated ecological concerns, but interconnected global crises with profound economic, social, cultural, and intergenerational consequences.
Long before the Earth Summit, however, nature had already developed one of the most powerful tools for restoring life: natural regeneration.
For millions of years, ecosystems have possessed the ability to recover, rebuild, and adapt through their own internal processes. Forests regenerate, coral systems recover, wetlands restore their functions, and marine ecosystems rebuild relationships between species when given the opportunity and protection to do so.
Thirty-four years after Rio, the world has once again convened to examine the science, evidence, and pathways needed to effectively address biodiversity loss and its underlying drivers, including climate change.
The 28th meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA-28) and the 7th meeting of the Subsidiary Body on Implementation (SBI-7) under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) provide a critical opportunity: a moment for governments and stakeholders to rethink how we understand and apply nature’s own technologies in restoring biodiversity.
The Ocean: Earth’s Largest Life-Support System
Scientific evidence continues to demonstrate that the ocean is the planet’s largest life-support system. It regulates climate, supports biodiversity, sustains livelihoods, and provides essential ecosystem services for billions of people.
Yet discussions under key SBSTTA-28 agenda items reveal a concerning imbalance in how we approach ecosystem restoration and innovation.
Under Agenda Item 5 on synthetic biology, considerable attention is directed toward technological opportunities, risks, capacity development, access to technology, and knowledge transfer associated with genetic and molecular approaches.
Meanwhile, under Agenda Item 8 on marine and coastal biodiversity, discussions focus heavily on ecologically or biologically significant marine areas and the conservation and sustainable use of marine ecosystems.
However, as discussions began at SBSTTA-28, the term “regenerative” was notably absent from the non-papers of both agenda items.
This highlights a critical disconnect: while global discussions increasingly explore advanced technological interventions, the ecological processes that have sustained life on Earth for millions of years remain underrepresented.
Natural Regeneration as Ecosystem Engineering
Modern technologies often focus on engineering individual species or manipulating genetic traits. While such innovations may have potential applications, they represent only one pathway among many.
Natural regeneration offers another approach — one that is ecosystem-wide, accessible, cost-effective, and grounded in ecological relationships.
Unlike interventions that focus on modifying individual organisms, regeneration can restore entire ecological systems by rebuilding:
- Habitat-forming species
- Food-web interactions
- Ecological connectivity
- Hydrological processes
- Community livelihoods
- Ecosystem resilience
In marine environments, allowing ecosystems to regenerate can support the recovery of coral reefs, mangroves, seagrass meadows, fish populations, and the communities that depend on them.
Nature itself is an ecosystem engineer.
The question is whether global biodiversity governance is sufficiently recognizing and supporting this capacity.
A Precautionary and Evidence-Based Pathway
Natural regeneration aligns strongly with the precautionary approach embedded within the CBD framework. It does not require redesigning ecosystems before understanding their full complexity.
Instead, it works with ecological processes that have already demonstrated resilience over evolutionary timescales.
Across the world, communities, Indigenous Peoples, conservation practitioners, and scientists have demonstrated that when ecosystems are protected from destructive pressures, nature can recover.
Supporting regeneration does not mean rejecting innovation. Rather, it means expanding our understanding of innovation to include the ecological intelligence already present within natural systems.
Rethinking the Future of Biodiversity Restoration
As countries advance implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), SBSTTA-28 should serve as a moment to broaden the conversation.
The future of biodiversity restoration should not only be defined by what humans can engineer, but also by what nature can regenerate when given the space and opportunity.
The world needs to recognize ocean regeneration as a legitimate ecosystem engineering mechanism — one that is scientifically supported, economically accessible, and capable of delivering benefits for biodiversity, climate resilience, and communities.
Nature has been restoring itself long before humans began designing technologies.
Perhaps the most important innovation of our time is learning how to work with it.
Author: Kevin Lunzalu-Shoshin
Organization: African CSOs Biodiversity Alliance (ACBA)