With only five years to go until the 2030 time horizon for the SDGs, participants at the 2025 International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress urged bold, transformative action across all sectors, rooted in justice, equity, and multilateral cooperation.

The Members’ Assembly – IUCN’s central decision-making body – adopted the Abu Dhabi Call to Action, which affirms that humanity has reached a critical point where nature faces escalating crises from climate change, degradation, biodiversity loss, pollution, and inequity. The Call to Action advocates for urgent global action in five priority areas:

• Reaffirming nature’s central role by protecting and restoring biodiversity in its own right – and as the foundation of human health, development, and well-being, while supporting local custodians and community-led action;
• Strengthening multilateralism by fostering collective leadership, cooperation, and adherence to international law, with coordinated policies that integrate nature across all sectors;
• Ensuring justice and inclusion by guaranteeing equitable participation and rights-based approaches for women, youth, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, and environmental defenders;
• Advancing knowledge and innovation by combining science with Indigenous knowledge and investing in research, education, and technology to drive evidence-based solutions; and
• Scaling resources for action by increasing and aligning financial, human, and technological resources towards regenerative, nature-positive economies, redirecting harmful subsidies, and enabling community resilience.

A once-every-four-years convening, the 2025 Congress focused on the theme, ‘Powering Transformative Conservation.’ It brought together diverse voices in multi-stream interactive meetings of the Forum to address five interconnected themes: scaling up resilient conservation action; reducing climate overshoot risks; delivering on equity; transitioning to nature-positive economies and societies; and disruptive innovation and leadership for conservation.

The Assembly adopted close to 150 motions resolving to pursue policy directions on biodiversity, climate, health, ecocide, and plastic pollution, among other areas.

The Congress also adopted a new 20-year Strategic Vision for IUCN, committing to influence, encourage, and assist societies in conserving the integrity and diversity of nature and to ensure any use of natural resources is both equitable and ecologically sustainable – as well as the quadrennial IUCN Programme 2026-2029 to lead and influence the global environmental agenda to achieve measurable impact.

In addition to the 2025 Congress, five summits took place alongside the Forum:

• The first World Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nature, which emphasized the enormous contributions to conservation by Indigenous Peoples, calling for Indigenous priorities to shape national plans and international frameworks;
• A Business Summit, where business leaders from around the world discussed their role in transitioning towards nature-positive economies and societies to help advance global conservation goals;
• A Global Youth Summit, which served as a platform to initiate critical discussions on how to shape youth-centered outcomes for conserving nature;
• A Philanthropy Summit, which sought to mobilize resources for a nature-positive future; and
• The third Middle East and North Africa (MENA) Oceans Summit, which built on the outcomes of the Third UN Ocean Conference (UNOC3) to facilitate cross-sectoral ocean solutions with lasting impact.

The 2025 IUCN World Conservation Congress took place in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (UAE), from 9-15 October 2025, bringing together around 10,000 participants. [ENB Coverage of 2025 IUCN World Conservation Congress]