This handbook explores how the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework can be effectively implemented through law, human rights, and economic transformation. By responding directly to Courts and last COP decisions and recommendations, it highlights the need for a human rights-based approach, environmental democracy, and stronger legal accountability to halt biodiversity loss. Bringing together interdisciplinary expertise, the book examines how rights—such as participation, justice, and protection of environmental defenders—are essential conditions for tackling unsustainability and injustice and for legitimate and effective biodiversity law and governance. It also addresses the urgent need to reform economic systems, from supply chains to consumption and trade, to support a regenerative economy aligned with nature. Through practical legal tools, policy insights, and real-world examples, the researchers demonstrate how human rights and democratic participation can reorient law away from extractive logics toward nurturing relationships with nature. Designed for policymakers, scholars, and civil society, this volume offers a roadmap for integrating biodiversity, climate, and justice into coherent, transformative action toward a sustainable and inclusive future in which all living beings can thrive.

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Editor: Claudia Ituarte-Lima

Authors: Anu Lähteenmäki-Uutela, Elisabeth Bürgi Bonanomi, Carola Glinski, Olga Giakouminaki, Radu Mares, Irene Musselli, Anna Ott, Minna Pappila, Liisa Varumo and Carlos Pardo Velásquez

This research was funded through the BIO-TRADE project, Protecting Biodiversity through Regulating Trade and Business Relations, as part of the 2020–2021 Biodiversa and Water JPI joint call for research projects, under the BiodivRestore ERA-NET Cofund (GA N°101003777), with the EU and the funding organizations Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF, Research Council of Finland, Innovation Fund Denmark and Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. Research for this article was also conducted through the DEFEND-BIO project, Biosphere Defenders Leveraging Legal and Governance Tools for Just Sustainability Transformation under the Biodiversa+ 2023 BiodivNBS call with the EU and the funding organizations Swedish Research Council Formas (2024-00900), Innovation Fund Denmark, FWO, SFN, and NWO. The content are responsibilities of the authors and the funders do not necessarily share the expressed views and interpretations in the handbook.