Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urged global consensus on conserving 30% of Earth’s land and waters by 2030 as the United Nations biodiversity conference, COP 15, opened in Montreal, presenting Canada as nature’s champion—despite its sizeable oil and gas investments.
Trudeau’s appeal was underscored by a searing speech from UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who warned humanity has become “a weapon of mass extinction.”
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In his opening remarks, Guterres decried humanity’s dissonant relationship with nature, which today finds “deforestation and desertification creating wastelands of once-thriving ecosystems,” and “land, water, and air poisoned by chemicals and pesticides, and choked with plastics.”
“This conference is our chance to stop this orgy of destruction,” he told delegates.
Emblematic of such destruction is the fact that “more than one million species, especially insects, are now threatened with extinction, vanishing at a rate not see in 10 million years,” reports Reuters. “As much as 40% of Earth’s land surfaces are considered degraded.”
Putting a dollar value on those losses, the World Economic Forum estimates that “roughly half of global gross domestic product, or about US$44 trillion of economic value, depends on the natural world in some way, meaning its destruction also carries an enormous financial toll,” reports Bloomberg.
Guterres slammed multinational corporations for turning the world’s ecosystems into “playthings of profit.”
“With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction,” he said.
Attempting to avert what Guterres described as “suicide by proxy,” COP 15 aims to bring the 196 countries who are signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to agreement on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF. The goal of the new global roadmap is to reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, en route to the CBD’s ultimate goal of living in harmony with nature by 2050, explains Carbon Brief.
Building on the UN’s Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-20 and its 20 biodiversity targets [pdf]—none of which have been met—the draft text of the GBF has 22 targets and 10 milestones.
Key GBF targets include the “30×30” pledge to conserve 30% of the Earth’s land and oceans by 2030; phasing out subsidies that harm biodiversity by at least $500 billion a year and “repurposing” them for nature; and figuring out the “financial flows” that will be imperative to restoring and protecting biodiversity.
But reaching consensus will not be easy. Three days of pre-summit talks failed to even deliver a clean draft from which to begin negotiations, and as the COP opened, the draft framework was a thicket of square brackets—some 1,400 at last count—indicating places where phrasing has yet to be agreed upon.
30×30 Brings Divisions
Even with a clean draft, however, delegates would face strenuous debate, beginning with the 30×30 target. Campaign group Avaaz is among those arguing the 30% target is too low, after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recommended 50% in its latest report, says Carbon Brief.
But for many Indigenous communities and groups, any talk of targets produces fear of further land grabs. In a November recommendation to CBD signatories, Amnesty International said that while the 30×30 proposal had the potential “to be a significant step forward in protecting biodiversity on the planet,” it also “presents a grave risk to the rights of Indigenous Peoples.” Given this risk, Amnesty urged that the 30×30 target not be included in the GBF “unless robust protections for the rights of Indigenous Peoples, and the rights of subsistence land-users, as currently enshrined in human rights law, are hard-wired into the text.”
Canada is throwing its weight behind 30×30. Trudeau declared during the opening ceremony that while national governments are frequently at loggerheads, “if we can’t agree as a world on something as fundamental as protecting nature, then nothing else matters.”
Canada ‘Complicit’ in the Crisis
But that call to action landed on the heels of news that in the weeks leading up to COP 15, Canada tried to water down the European Union’s newly-instituted ban on the import of any product that could be judged to have contributed to deforestation after December 30, 2020.
Citing a leaked letter from the Canadian ambassador to the EU, Ailish Campbell, the Guardian reports that Canada asked the EU to reconsider its “burdensome traceability requirements” for timber products, as well as its decision to include “degraded” forests in its protective efforts.
“It is Canada’s extractivism, both on Indigenous lands in Canada and around the world, that’s complicit in the biodiversity crisis,” said Tegan Hansen, Senior Forests Campaigner at Stand.earth, recalling Trudeau’s opening remarks that nature is “under attack” and responding to the country’s announcement that it will be providing C$350 million in new international financing for biodiversity.
Meanwhile, Canada offers up $14 billion per year in public financing for fossil fuels, more than any other G20 country, “with negative implications to biodiversity,” said Avaaz campaign director Oscar Soria.
“We hope Trudeau will step up with more commitment and action in the future, in order to close the biodiversity finance gap.”
‘Thorny’ Financing Targets
Carbon Brief describes the financing gap for nature protection as “one of the thorniest targets in the GBF.”
Up for debate at COP 15 will be Brazil’s proposal, put forward in Nairobi in June, for a new Global Biodiversity Fund that would collect and distribute US$100 billion in international financing each year, starting in 2025.
South Africa and the 22-member Like-minded Group of Developing Countries on Biodiversity and Development support Brazil’s proposal, while the United Kingdom and countries of the JUSCANZ bloc (Japan, United States, Switzerland, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) are against it.
Describing the $100 billion target as “unrealistic,” European negotiators told Politico that doubling financing from its current $6 billion would be “a good achievement.”
But a recent report by the Paulson Institute estimated that reversing biodiversity loss by 2030 will require an average annual investment of $711 billion, writes Politico. For context, “in 2019, global investments in biodiversity conservation amounted to between $124 billion and $143 billion.”
Speaking on condition of anonymity, several European negotiators told Politico that Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine means “the money question is going to be difficult,” because the war has “captured the attention at the highest political level.”
A negotiator from an African country responded that many parts of that continent are still reeling from economic impacts of the pandemic, even as they struggle to survive the “very tangible” spike in wheat prices that are the fallout of the Ukraine war.
Still with conservation financing, Bloomberg writes that the UN is touting its own hot-off-the-press research into biodiversity credits. Responding to criticism that offset markets are a “documented failure,” the study authors say a “clear distinction” between biocredits—or positive investment in nature with no strings attached—and biodiversity offsets as compensation for damage done elsewhere, would keep the mechanism honest and rigorous.
Meanwhile, Friends of the Earth International has a report [pdf] on the extent to which the corporate sector has “captured” both the CBD and the post-2020 GBF.
