SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
global biodiversity framework
'The Window Is Closing': Fears Grow That World Leaders Will Fail to Protect Nature at COP16
"The very limited progress we've seen so far in the negotiations at COP16 is insufficient to address the very real implications of getting this wrong," one expert said.
Oct 31, 2024
As a major international biodiversity summit approaches its Friday conclusion, environmental advocates fear that world leaders will not make the conservation and financial commitments needed to halt the destruction of nature.
The 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the Convention on Biological Diversity launched in Cali, Colombia on October 21. It is the first international meeting since nations pledged to protect 30% of land and ocean ecosystems by 2030 and generate $700 billion a year to fund the protection of nature, with a smaller goal of $200 billion per year by 2030.
Yet nations are not on track to meet these goals, even as studies released this month warn that vertebrates have declined on average by nearly three-quarters in the last half-century and that over a third of analyzed tree species are at risk of extinction.
"Each passing day without the fulfillment of agreed commitments is a missed opportunity to protect biodiversity."
"The very limited progress we've seen so far in the negotiations at COP16 is insufficient to address the very real implications of getting this wrong," Yadvinder Malhi, a University of Oxford professor of ecosystem science, toldThe Guardian. "Biodiversity is continuing to decline at an alarming rate. I really hope that the crunch discussions this week yield those commitments, for the sake of a flourishing future for people and for our planet."
World leaders failed to meet a single one of the biodiversity targets set for 2020 in Aichi, Japan. There was hope, after nations agreed to a Global Biodiversity Framework during the Kunming-Montreal talks that concluded in December 2022, that the next decade would be different. Yet progress so far has been lagging.
Ahead of COP16, nearly 85% of countries missed the deadline to submit new national biodiversity strategies and action plans, according to an analysis from Carbon Brief. Since the deadline passed, only five more countries had submitted plans as of October 25.
An official progress report published Monday by the United Nations Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Center and the International Union for Conservation of Nature concluded that only 17.6% of land and 8.4% of the ocean are currently protected. To meet the 30 by 30 goal, nations will need to protect a land area the size of Australia and Brazil put together and a marine area larger than the Indian Ocean within the next six years.
"This report is a clear reminder that with only six years remaining until 2030, the window is closing for us to equitably and meaningfully conserve 30% of the Earth," IUCN director general Grethel Aguilar said in a statement. "The '30 by 30' is an ambitious target, but one that is still within reach if the international community works together across borders, demographics, and sectors."
A major stumbling block to meeting any targets is the question of who will pay for it, how, and how much. This has emerged as a central point of contention in the talks, with Global South nations and environmental justice advocates calling on the wealthier nations of the Global North to do more.
Wealthier countries have pledged $20 billion a year in public money by 2025, yet the African delegation said that the idea these countries would reach the goal was "wishful thinking," The Guardian reported.
On Monday, the U.K., Germany, France, Norway, and four other countries promised $163 million. But Alice Jay, Campaign for Nature's director of international relations, said actually meeting the target "would require them to announce $300 million each month from now to 2025, and then keep that up each year until 2030."
"Countries from the Global South expect more from the Global North," Nigeria Environment Minister Iziaq Kunle Salako said. "Finance is key in the context of implementing all the targets."
Brian O'Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, told The Guardian that progress had been "too slow."
"I think political prioritization of nature is still too low," O'Donnell said. "This is reflected by progress on the targets. Several target[s] are very easy to measure: 30x30 has metrics on area and quality, finance has a dollar figure. We have new data on both that show we're not on pace."
O'Donnell added that it was "disturbing' to approach countries about their finance plans and be received as if making an unrealistic demand, rather than a follow-up on a pledge the country had already made.
"To me, that is a reflection of not a true commitment to this," he said.
As the second week of negotiations began on Sunday, Greenpeace called on wealthier nations to step up and also to offer funds for Indigenous and local communities that are on the frontlines of protecting biodiversity in their territories.
"Each passing day without the fulfillment of agreed commitments is a missed opportunity to protect biodiversity," Estefania Gonzalez, Greenpeace Andino's deputy campaigns director, said in a statement. "Countries with greater resources have both the capacity and responsibility to drive change, by meeting the agreed goals and supporting those facing the greatest impacts of biodiversity loss."
An Lambrechts, a biodiversity politics expert at Greenpeace International, said that progress had partly been held up by lobbying efforts from the private sector, as has notably been the case at international climate talks as well.
"Well-paid industry representatives are doing their worst to undermine progress to ensure they can continue profiting off nature for free," Lambrechts said. "We need less big promo shows for false solutions like 'biodiversity credits' and more of the new money for actual nature protection that is absent so far. What is clear in Cali is the world is ready for global action on biodiversity if governments can deliver a real outcome at COP16."
Indigenous advocates have also called for money to be sent to them directly, rather than through intermediaries.
"Very little reaches the territories," Tabea Cacique, a member of the Asháninka people of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest, said at the talks, as El Paísreported. "Do not look at us as Indigenous peoples who cannot manage the funds; teach us."
Yet even as funding remains illusive, the stakes are high.
"Nature is life," U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said in an address at COP16 on Tuesday, "and yet we are waging a war against it. A war where there can be no winner."
"Every year, we see temperatures climbing higher," he continued. "Every day, we lose more species. Every minute, we dump a garbage truck of plastic waste into our oceans, rivers, and lakes. Make no mistake. This is what an existential crisis looks like."
In his address, Guterres called for "making peace with nature."
"Biodiversity is humanity's ally," he said. "We must move from plundering it to preserving it. As I have said time and again, making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century."
Keep ReadingShow Less
140 Groups Urge Biodiversity Summit Attendees to Halt New Oil and Gas
"The industry's operations and the use of its products disrupt fragile ecosystems, destroy habitats, and pollute air, water, and soil, pushing countless species to human-induced extinction."
Oct 29, 2024
With just a few more days of the United Nations biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, 140 organizations collectively called on government representatives to pursue "an immediate halt" to new planet-heating oil and gas projects and "a managed decline of existing activity."
The letter—signed by civil society groups, Indigenous peoples, and social movements—advocates "prioritizing areas of high biodiversity importance" and stresses the need for "a full, fair, fast, funded, and feminist phaseout of all fossil fuels and to halt and reverse biodiversity loss."
"Oil and gas activity threatens biodiversity at every stage—from exploration and production to transportation and end use," the letter states. "The industry's operations and the use of its products disrupt fragile ecosystems, destroy habitats, and pollute air, water, and soil, pushing countless species to human-induced extinction. The risk oil and gas activity poses to biodiversity grows as these operations expand into vulnerable ecosystems."
"Effective biodiversity protection is not possible without halting the expansion of oil and gas activity."
"Places like the Amazon, including the mouth of the Amazon River, are experiencing significant environmental and social impacts from oil and gas activity," the letter notes. "Deforestation, habitat destruction, and pollution of water sources are threatening biodiversity in one of the world's most critical ecosystems, and severely disrupting the fundamental human rights and livelihoods of Indigenous peoples."
The coalition—which includes Amazon Watch, Center for International Environmental Law, Earthjustice, Greenpeace, Oil Change International, Waterkeepers Alliance, and World Wide Fund for Nature—has a list of recommendations for attendees of the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16).
The groups want summit attendees to "recognize the threat that oil and gas activity poses to all biodiversity, particularly in areas of high biodiversity importance." Regarding such vital areas, they want attendees to "identify concrete actions currently being taken and that will be taken in the future to immediately reduce oil and gas activities" as well as "adopt a decision to immediately halt" new fossil fuel activities in such spaces.
The organizations are also calling for a "fossil fuel-free zone" in the Amazon and prioritizing "the protection of environmental and human rights defenders." According to Global Witness, at least 196 such activists were killed in 2023 alone, bringing the total since 2012 to 2,106.
Additionally, the coalition wants COP16 attendees to "enhance equitable international cooperation to ensure that countries with the greatest historical responsibility for driving biodiversity loss and the production and use of fossil fuels move first and fastest to halt the expansion of oil and gas activity, and pursue new enforceable international mechanisms, such as a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty."
"Faced with an unprecedented planetary crisis, the time is now for parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity to fulfill their legal obligations and reaffirm their mandate to protect global biodiversity," the letter argues. "Effective biodiversity protection is not possible without halting the expansion of oil and gas activity, and eliminating the threat from ongoing oil and gas activity, particularly in areas of high biodiversity importance."
COP16 kicked off in Cali on October 21 and is set to wrap up on November 1. Reutersreported Tuesday that "countries were at an impasse over how to fund conservation and other key decisions... with nations pledging millions of dollars rather than the billions needed."
At COP15 in late 2022, countries finalized the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aims to protect 30% of all land and water vital to species and ecosystems by 2030. To reach that goal, "protected and conserved areas must almost double in area on land and more than triple in the ocean, the U.N. Environment Program World Conservation Monitoring Center and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said Monday.
The IUCN also
warned Monday as part of its "Red List" that more than 16,000 of 47,000 analyzed tree species worldwide are at risk of extinction. The report followed similar warnings of wildlife population decline released ahead of COP16.
Keep ReadingShow Less
We Know What’s Behind Biodiversity Loss—It’s Time to Actually Tackle It
To halt global biodiversity loss in an equitable and gender-responsive manner, countries must stop subsidizing export-oriented economic sectors.
Oct 24, 2024
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular