The COP15 UN Biodiversity Conference, COP15, took place in Montreal last week. It produced an outcome that most observers see as positive for the future of the environment and the planet’s living creatures.
As usual with these events, the negotiations seemed hopeless until the very end, when magically a final declaration and agreement was produced, signed by the participants. It is being described by some as the biodiversity equivalent of the Pairs 2015 climate change agreement, when nations agreed for the first time to limit emissions.
The centrepiece of what the BBC called a “historic agreement” (officially known as the Kunming-Montreal Global biodiversity framework) is the 30 x 30 pledge. Signed by almost 200 countries, that says 30% of the planet (land and sea) should be protected by 2030, whilst also protecting and respecting indigenous people and territories as new areas are protected. Currently, 17% of land and 10% of marine areas are protected.
There is also a focus on reducing harmful subsidies that contribute to the extinction of wildlife. That focuses on both government and business actions. For instance, Target 15 of the agreement requires governments to ensure that large and transnational companies disclose “their risks, dependencies and impacts on biodiversity”. The text encourages policymakers to “encourage and enable” businesses to monitor, assess and disclose their impacts on biodiversity, but this is not mandatory.
However, as usual, there is plenty for the cynic in the outcomes. For a start, there is still a lack of awareness of just how big a problem this is. The event got fairly limited media coverage, and the issue does not have the profile of climate change, even though the numbers are shocking. 69 per cent of the planet’s wildlife has been lost in just 50 years due to land-use change and pollution, 75 per cent of land is fundamentally altered, 66 per cent of oceans negatively affected and 80 per cent of wetlands lost.
Unlike the big climate summits, this event did not attract many “big name” politicians, with Ministers and officials doing the work rather than national leaders. And the USA is not a member of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and hence not a signatory to this agreement, even though the country was represented in Montreal and is supporting many biodiversity actions, including the 30 x 30 commitment.
There was also little about limiting the use of pesticides and chemicals, a major source of biodiversity loss, and nothing about reducing meat consumption. Again, loss of wild areas such as rainforests as they are converted to farming use is a major contributor to biodiversity degradation.
Arguments about funding continued too. The Democratic Republic of the Congo tried to block the final declaration because of unhappiness at the level of funding from the richer nations for biodiversity actions. None of the 2010 Aichi Biodiversity Targets were achieved and biodiversity loss worsened in the 2011-2020 period – many experts consider lack of well-targeted funds was a key driver of that failure.
Finally, whilst there is a monitoring framework to evaluate progress, which will be further refined at COP16 in Turkey in 2024, there are no binding commitments. Actions are fundamentally voluntary, with no legal framework to back up promises and no action that can be taken against countries which do not deliver.
Over my lifetime, humanity may well wipe out 90% of the world’s wildlife. That’s not just tigers and whales - it is birds in the English hedgerows, insects in the air and soil, and almost everything in the sea. I find that shocking, and my guess is that in 2122 our descendants (if there are any left) will have even less sympathy for our actions and inactions here than they will for climate inaction. We just can’t bring back living species once they are gone.
So maybe we’ll give two cheers for Montreal. It is a start, but we need to do much more. And closer to home, I’ll come back to some practical thoughts about the contribution procurement can make in my next article here.