Why COP15 could redefine our relationship with nature

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was first signed by 150 government leaders at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Its main objectives are to conserve biological diversity, promote sustainable use of the components of biological diversity, and ensure fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.

The 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) starts on Wednesday in Montreal, Canada. Over 10,000 delegates, including official representatives of 196 countries, will participate in COP15, which Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the CBD, has described to be the “Paris moment for nature,” alluding to the landmark 2015 Paris climate pact where all countries unanimously agreed to limit global temperature rise within 2 degrees Celsius compared with pre-industrial times and make efforts to keep it within 1.5 degrees.

HT Image

The biodiversity summit is being held weeks after the 27th UN climate conference concluded in Egypt’s Sharm El Sheikh on November 20. “There is no pathway to limiting global warming to 1.5C without action on protecting and restoring nature,” the architects of the Paris Agreement said in a statement on November 15.

The UN biodiversity conferences have never received as much attention and political momentum as the climate summits, mainly because heads of states have not attended these summits and regulations under CBD have been weak with little monitoring of targets. This time, too, no heads of state are attending other than Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The overarching goal of COP15 is to finalise a framework to “halt and reverse biodiversity loss” and “put nature on a path to recovery” by 2030.

What is CBD?

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was first signed by 150 government leaders at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Its main objectives are to conserve biological diversity, promote sustainable use of the components of biological diversity, and ensure fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources.

The agreement has been ratified by 196 countries. The US has not ratified the agreement, although US government representatives will participate in the Montreal summit.

Why is COP15 critical?

• The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the world’s largest collective of ecologists, has in its 2019 global assessment report said 75% of the earth’s land surface is significantly altered, 66% of the ocean area is experiencing increasing cumulative impacts, and over 85% of wetlands has been lost. Although the rate of forest loss has slowed globally since 2000, it is distributed unequally. Across much of the highly biodiverse tropics, 32 million hectares of primary or recovering forest were lost between 2010 and 2015. An average of around 25% of species in animal and plant groups are threatened, the IPBES found, suggesting that around 1 million species face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss. Without action, there will be a further quickening in the global rate of species extinction, which is at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years.

• In 2020, scientists sounded an alarm on the ongoing sixth mass extinction, which can lead to a complete collapse of humanity’s life support systems. In a paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on June 1, 2020, scientists examined 29,400 species of terrestrial vertebrates and found that 1.7% of them, or 515 species of mammals, birds, amphibians and reptiles have fewer than 1,000 individuals each, tottering on the brink of extinction.

• In October this year, the Living Planet Report 2022 flagged that in just over 50 years, there has been a 69% drop on average in the wildlife population globally, including mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish. The biennial report published by World Wide Fund for Nature revealed that there has been a 55% loss in wildlife in Asia and the Pacific, but Latin America and the Caribbean region is the worst impacted with a 94% loss since 1970. Freshwater species have recorded the highest overall global decline during the period at 83%.

• More than half of the global gross domestic product relies on biodiversity and healthy ecosystems. A collapse in ecosystem services, such as pollination, could result in a $2.7 trillion decline in global GDP by 2030, according to the World Bank.

What does COP15 hope to deliver?

• The main objective of COP15 is to adopt an ambitious global biodiversity framework.

• The framework will replace the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, which expired in 2020 and were considered to be a failure by many experts. The Nature journal published an editorial on February 18, 2020, stating that the targets failed mainly because their implementation was not measurable and countries did not report progress.

• There are 22 targets that countries will implement under the framework. Some of the contentious issues to be negotiated for the framework are the target to protect 30% of land and sea areas by 2030; review and monitoring of implementation of targets under the framework; and how funding would be mobilised for developing nations to achieve these targets.

• “Stakes are huge, time is short, and negotiations will be tricky,” says the Nature Conservancy, an international environmental organisation. Among the many issues to be negotiated at COP15 will be infrastructure, agriculture, invasive species, pesticides, the role of business, and government subsidies that harm the environment.

• Currently, most parts of the post 2020 framework text are bracketed, which means there is no agreement on these clauses. Even the text on more than 1 million species facing extinction is presently bracketed.

• Some scientists have said COP15 goals are unrealistic as biodiversity loss cannot be reversed in a decade. Even the most ambitious modelling suggests that the earliest date possible to halt and reverse biodiversity loss is by 2050, according to David Obura of the Coastal Oceans Research and Development in the Indian Ocean (CORDIO), a non-profit organisation in Mombasa, Kenya, the New Scientist reported on December 5 . “Even that’s based on the most simplistic assumptions,” he said. “It doesn’t even accommodate climate change.”