To meet the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity, researchers have proposed five strategies for protecting the global ecosystem. Responding to calls to rethink the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the world’s blueprint for the next decade of biodiversity conservation and management, researchers at the China Programme of World Agroforestry (ICRAF) and the Kunming Institute of Botany have published a new paper describing five transformative changes to stabilize and then reverse critical biodiversity losses. They advocate for inclusion of these five steps in plans developed at the upcoming Fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the CBD to be held in Kunming, China in 2021. Bioscience under the title, ‘Five steps to inject transformative change into the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework,’ posits a radical new path forward for reversing the accelerating loss of biodiversity and strengthening our capacity to protect nature.