We Know What’s Behind Biodiversity Loss—It’s Time to Actually Tackle It

As global leaders converge in Colombia for the COP16 global biodiversity summit this week, they face a stark reality: Despite over a decade of pledges to protect biodiversity, not a single global target has been fully achieved.

Forests continue to burn, habitats are vanishing, and biodiversity is spiraling toward collapse. Without addressing the systemic drivers of environmental destruction—especially in the Global South—this failure will persist.

The last biodiversity summit (COP15) saw the adoption of decisions on instruments to reduce inequalities, ensure a gender-responsive approach to biodiversity action, take a human rights-based approach, and guarantee access to justice and participation in decision-making by communities. These points are found in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity’s Gender Plan of Action and the Global Biodiversity Framework’s Targets 22 and 23 and Section C on implementation.

The economic model that Global South countries are forced to pursue by the international financial institutions, based on natural resource extraction with highly unequal distribution of benefits and impacts, is driving extinction and global biodiversity loss.

In Cali, countries will take stock of the targets and commitments adopted so far. This meeting is a crucial opportunity to assess how well the 196 signatories of the convention—sadly, the United States is not one of them—have tackled biodiversity loss so far. And because the crisis we face is so urgent, it’s also a moment in which we must look toward the leadership of women, who play key roles in local agricultural production, family and local economies, and stewardship of biodiversity in key areas like the Amazon.

Picture women like Lucy Mulenkei, a Masai woman who has championed the interests of marginalized pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities throughout Africa. Or Patricia Gualinga, who has led her Kichwa community in the Amazon in keeping oil drilling off their land and proposing a “living forest” model for rights-based conservation. And Xananine Calvillo, a young woman from Mexico who recently called on the World Bank to stop loaning money to factory farming companies that destroy forests and rivers in sensitive ecosystems.

Our governments and institutions have failed in the past, but they have a chance to listen to women leaders this week. It’s urgent that they do this, and start putting their money where their mouth is, ending subsidies for harmful industries that are behind biodiversity loss.

Why Past Plans on Biodiversity Failed

The strategy agreed in 2010 to guide global action during the U.N. Decade on Biodiversity (2011-2020) recognized the need to address the underlying drivers of biodiversity loss. The failure to tackle these root causes is one of the reasons cited in the third edition of the Global Biodiversity Outlook as to why we didn’t meet the first global biodiversity target in 2010.

Building on this analysis, the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020 structured the 20 Aichi Biodiversity Targets around five Strategic Goals, setting benchmarks for progress through relevant policies and enabling conditions.

However, at the global level, none of the 20 Aichi Targets were fully achieved.

Target 4 on sustainable production and consumption was deemed not achieved with “high confidence,” which means that actions to reduce the ecological footprint failed after a decade of commitment. Between 2011 and 2016, the ecological footprint remained at approximately 1.7 times the level of biocapacity—in other words, requiring “1.7 Earths” to regenerate the biological resources used by our societies.

The rate of loss of all natural habitats including forests, which is considered in Aichi Target 5, is not lower than that of previous decades, with South America surpassing a record for forest fires this year, with 433,000 fire hotspots and over 14.4 million hectares of forest cover burned or affected in different biomes of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Peru. Brazil and Bolivia alone have seen their forest devastated by 7 million hectares each, while the Amazon river basin is reporting the lowest levels on record amid a severe drought driven by climate change.

What’s Behind Biodiversity Loss

Governments continue to provide billions of dollars in tax breaks, subsidies, and other perverse incentives to support deforestation, water pollution, and fossil fuel consumption which directly work against the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement and the Global Biodiversity Framework.

By some measures, countries spend at least $2.6 trillion a year on propping up polluting industries, which is equal to 2.5% of global GDP. And the wealthiest nations claim there isn’t enough money to help Global South countries respond to the crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

The failure to tackle the underlying causes of biodiversity loss, including fossil fuel extraction, mining, industrial agriculture, intensive livestock farming, large-scale infrastructure projects, and monoculture tree plantations— estimated to drive up to 90% of biodiversity loss—are partly linked to the contradictions within the Global Biodiversity Framework. Biodiversity offsets and other market-based schemes considered in Target 19(d) undermine Goal C of the framework, which is to protect the integrity, connectivity, and resilience of all ecosystems.

Forest fires continue to rage in the Amazon, and there’s no time to let companies swoop in with false solutions to the problem.

Letting the market have its way with biodiversity policy is not the way to achieve biodiversity protection, either. So-called biodiversity investment projects have increasingly been exposed for human rights violations, social and gender impacts, conceptual flaws like inattention to ecosystem integrity, and problems with compliance and effectiveness.

The economic model that Global South countries are forced to pursue by the international financial institutions, based on natural resource extraction with highly unequal distribution of benefits and impacts, is driving extinction and global biodiversity loss. That’s why, if we really want to enable urgent and transformative action, government support for export-oriented economic sectors, subsidies, preferential tax subsidies, and diluting environmental regulations must end immediately.

Here’s What Should Happen at COP16

The biodiversity summit this week in Colombia presents us with an opportunity to reaffirm our collective commitment to forest and biodiversity conservation.

Women in all their diversity, Indigenous peoples and local communities, Afro-descendants, peasants, youth, and grassroots movements must be central in shaping the policies that will guide our future. Governments must prioritize people and the planet over corporate profit in a way that is just and equitable, gender-responsive, rights-based, and rooted in a non-market-based approach led by real, community-led solutions.

Transformative change necessarily demands challenging the international financial and monetary systems that force Global South governments to maintain and expand extractive activities and perpetuate the destruction of nature, as well as gender and social inequalities.

As global leaders gather in Cali to review the state of implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework and show the alignment of their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans with the Framework, it is crucial that we critically examine the level of biodiversity commitments and address the structural drivers of biodiversity loss.

If we ignore those structural drivers, the harmful activities that are the same ones countries have been propping up with subsidies and favorable terms, there’s no way to halt the biodiversity crisis. Forest fires continue to rage in the Amazon, and there’s no time to let companies swoop in with false solutions to the problem. Transformative change is what is needed, and women like Xananine, Lucy, and Patricia will be there at COP16 with real solutions in their hands.