When Panama’s President, José Raúl Mulino, took the stage at the United Nations General Assembly in 2025 to announce the Pacto de Panamá con la Naturaleza (The Panama Nature Pledge), it marked more than a national policy milestone. It was a demonstration of strong country ownership: a government-led commitment to Nature, anchored in national policy, and designed to accelerate action on biodiversity from the ground up.

For a small nation at the crossroads of two continents and two oceans, Panama has long held an outsized role in global biodiversity. Now, through the Panama Nature Pledge, it is taking on an equally large ambition: to bring its commitments on climate, biodiversity, oceans, plastics, and land degradation together under a single national framework. The Pledge represents a deliberate move toward a model in which protecting Nature is central to Panama’s constitutional mandate, not peripheral to it. 

Gonzalo Griebenow, who serves as the country’s NBSAP Facilitator through the NBSAP Accelerator Partnership Facilitator Programme, supports the coordination processes underpinning Panama’s integrated approach. In the short video below, he explains how the Pledge brings together the country’s commitments on biodiversity, climate, oceans, plastics, and land degradation into one coordinated framework.

At the core of the Pledge is a set of 30 national targets spanning the three Rio Conventions, oceans policy, and plastics management. Rather than treating these as separate agendas, the Pledge creates a single planning and implementation pathway that links environmental priorities directly to national development and environment strategies. In addition to shared targets, the Pledge calls for identifying shared indicators and a unified monitoring, reporting, and verification system. Countries are typically required to produce extensive, separate reports for each Rio Convention, despite drawing on largely overlapping data and indicators.

The value of the Panama Nature Pledge’s approach lies in what integration can unlock. The Pledge commits to streamlining processes to achieve a more strategic use of limited resources. It also establishes a diversified financing strategy, positioning Panama to strategically mobilise public investment, international finance, and private-sector engagement around shared priorities.

Tangibly, the Nature Pledge outlines verifiable goals for Panama for 2035. Among its most ambitious are:

• Restore 100,000 hectares of essential ecosystems
• Protect 40% of land territory and 60% of marine and inland waters
• Reduce plastic pollution by 50%
• Reduce emissions by 11%

Led by the Ministry of Environment, the initiative was championed at the highest levels of government and is now prompting active engagement and collaboration from the ministries of agriculture, finance, water, and foreign affairs. This whole-of-government orientation reflects an understanding that biodiversity cannot be advanced through environmental policy alone. It must be mainstreamed across national planning, financing, and governance systems. The Pledge is creating the conditions for that to happen.

Gonzalo Griebenow, who serves as the country’s NBSAP Facilitator through the NBSAP Accelerator Partnership Facilitator Programme, supports the coordination processes underpinning Panama’s integrated approach and helps connect the country’s evolving NBSAP needs with relevant partners and resources. Reflecting on the Pledge, he noted:

While Panama’s Nature Pledge is still in its early stages of implementation, it offers a timely and instructive example of how to integrate Nature into the core of government policy and action. Environmental Minister Juan Carlos Navarro framed the Pledge as a decisive shift toward more coordinated environmental governance as he concluded his opening statement to the document:

Read the full pledge here.