COP15 - Where Next?
Australia is one of seven countries totaling 50% of global biodiversity loss. The beloved Koala has declined by 30% mostly due to habitat loss and is listed as endangered in parts of Australia.
"...‘Nature’s too big for humans to influence…It’s been a shock event, a bit like an asteroid hitting the planet.” So says Colin N. Waters, geologist and chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, a panel that has been deliberating the issue of an amended timeline since 2009.An amended timeline would officially recognize that humankind’s effects on the planet had been so consequential as to bring the previous chapter of Earth’s history to a close. It would acknowledge that these effects will be discernible in the rocks for millenniums (an official designation of anthropocene as an epoch rather than an "event" is still in progress).
In this proposed chapter, there is little doubt regarding the causality of human activity regarding biodiversity losses. For a more detailed understanding, as to the extent of loss the Red List assesses and tabulates extinctions and levels of potential extinctions. A paper published in Science Advances looks at future vertebrate losses from climate and land use change. Earth could lose more than a tenth of its plant and animal species by the end of the century if the current climate trends continue. The study puts the number to more than one in ten species being lost by the end of the century.
An array of international and national laws and policy instruments have often produced relevant policies and potential cooperative models. However, past and ongoing global governance efforts have not effectively supported conservation efforts or the equitable use of biodiversity in any sustained manner.
One hundred fifty government leaders signed a treaty, effective in June 1993, at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The Convention on Biological Diversity was a multilateral treaty with three main goals: the conservation of biological diversity; the sustainable use of its components; and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources. The overarching goal (or vision) was to achieve a “world living in harmony with nature.” The treaty was a ten-year agreement. According to the overseers of the Convention, the agreement “failed to fully achieve a single target at the global level” even as the issue of lost biodiversity grew more dire and more visible. This proved again true at the 2010 UN summit in Nagoya Japan. In both cases countries were not held to specific actions.
The 15th meeting (COP 15) of the (conference of the parties)took place from December 7 to December 19, 2022 in Montreal Canada to continued the work under the treaty. One hundred ninety member nations were represented (it should be noted here that typically the US was not one of those nations along with one other country).
The Conference was a two-week negotiation to commit to goals, to agree on a unifying framework, and to formulate action plans to protect nature and “halt” biodiversity loss around the world.
A Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) was adopted at COP 15. Twenty two targets were identified to be met by 2030, and four longer-term overarching goals by 2050. The agreement reached at the end of the Conference was viewed as a success.
The plan is to restore the health of the planet so that it can sustainably support people and nature. Governments and others would achieve this goal through a combination of increased protection of lands, waters, and wildlife; reduced pollution; more sustainable fisheries; and sustained financing, as two sustainable development goals, as well as “the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.”
The first sticky concern is that despite financial challenges facing nations associated with war and climate change negotiators will need to address the financing gap between what is needed to sufficiently protect global biodiversity and what is available now.
A study by the Paulson Institute, https://www.paulsoninstitute.org/a research organization, found that reversing biodiversity decline by 2030 through public/private resources means addressing a financing gap of about $700 billion per year.
The Conference draft, based on the last two weeks of talks, set a financial target of $200 billion per year for conservation initiatives. There was some tension surrounding the fact that financial support from wealthy countries, (the largest polluters) were outweighed by increased funding to be provided by developing nations. Colombia’s Environment Minister, Susana Muhamad , noted that further work was needed to align “resources and ambition.”
The second sticky concern but equal challenge, as is true with COP 27, is the question of governance. Aligning resources and ambition on a global scale is no easy task. Adaptive governance in the face of climate change is even more challenging. Enacting and funding the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) defies many nations’ past practices as evidenced in the previous Conferences.
Next, the funding identified to deliver the COP15 general conservation goals does not recognize enough the need for funds to address biodiversity within ecosystems. A species might go extinct for multiple, simultaneous reasons in various contexts. There is a need to identify localized direct and indirect drivers in relation to respective ecosystems and to concurrently distribute effective funding support for ground-up indigenous responses. In this regard, thinking smaller and smarter in the distribution of wealth with an ecosystem perspective that follows an Anthropocene understanding can demonstrate that nature is not too big to influence. It will remind us through cooperative efforts that nature’s boundaries are not national boundaries and, finally, that we hold no dominion over nature, only the hope of good stewardship.
Muhamad said about COP 15, “I’m very optimistic that, as the main goals have been landed and there is no, in general, opposition to these goals, we have made a very important step forward."
While this is a positive note coming out of COP 15, the next steps are critical regardless of realities facing nations such as food insecurity associated with Putin’s invasion and the effects of climate change. As the Environmental Minister noted, “We have to understand that there will be no food on the planet with no biodiversity.”