Despite earlier signals of possible failure, countries around the world have cemented a deal to safeguard nature — and for the first time, the agreement sets quantitative biodiversity targets akin to the one that nations set seven years ago to limit global warming to 1.5–2 ºC above pre-industrial levels.
In the early hours of 19 December, more than 190 countries eked out the deal, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, during the COP15 international biodiversity summit in Montreal, Canada. A key target it sets is for nations to protect and restore 30% of the world’s land and seas globally by 2030, while also respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples who depend on and steward much of Earth’s remaining biodiversity. Another target is for nations to reduce the extinction rate by 10-fold for all species by 2050.
Steven Guilbeault, the Canadian environment minister, described COP15 as the most significant biodiversity conference ever held. “We have taken a great step forward in history,” he said at a plenary session where the framework was adopted.
At several points during the United Nations summit, which ran from 7–19 December, arguments over details threatened to derail a deal. In the final hours of negotiations, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) objected to how the framework would be funded. Nonetheless, Huang Runqiu, China’s environment minister and president of COP15, brought the gavel down on the agreement.
Negotiators from several African countries, which are home to biodiversity hotspots but say they need funding to preserve those areas, thought that China’s presidency strong-armed the deal. Uganda called it “fraud”. A source who spoke to Nature from the African delegation, and who asked not to be named to maintain diplomacy, said the negotiating process was not equitable towards developing countries and that the deal will not enable significant progress towards stemming biodiversity loss. “It was a coup d’état,” they say. However, a legal expert for the Convention on Biological Diversity — the treaty within which the framework now sits — told COP15 attendees that the adoption of the framework is legitimate.
Concerns and disappointments
Scientists and conservation groups have welcomed the deal, emphasizing that there has never been an international agreement to protect nature on this scale. Kina Murphy, an ecologist and chief scientist at the Campaign for Nature, a conservation group, says, “It’s a historic moment for biodiversity.”
But some concerns and disappointments remain. For one, the deal lacks a mandatory requirement for companies to track and disclose their impact on biodiversity. “Voluntary action is not enough,” says Eva Zabey, executive director of Business for Nature, a global coalition of 330 businesses seeking such a requirement so that firms can compete on a level playing field. Nevertheless, it sends a powerful signal to industry that it will need to reduce negative impacts over time, says Andrew Deutz, an environmental law and finance specialist at the Nature Conservancy, a conservation group in Arlington, Virginia.
In addition, the deal is weak on tackling the drivers of biodiversity loss, because it does not specifically call out the most ecologically damaging industries, such as commercial fishing and agriculture, or set precise targets for them to put biodiversity conservation at the centre of their operations, researchers say.
“I would have liked more ambition and precision in the targets” to address those drivers, says Sandra Diaz, an ecologist at the National University of Córdoba, in Argentina.
The deal is not legally binding, but countries will have to demonstrate progress towards achieving the framework’s goals through national and global reviews. Countries failed to meet the previous Aichi Biodiversity Targets, which were set in 2010 and expired in 2020; scientists have suggested that this failure occurred because of a lack of an accountability mechanism.
With the reviews included, the framework “is a very good start, with clear quantitative targets” that will allow us to understand progress and the reasons for success and failure, says Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and head of Saving Nature, a non-profit conservation organization.
A long time coming
Scientists have estimated that one million species are under threat because of habitat loss, mainly through converting land for agriculture. And they have warned that this biodiversity loss could threaten the health of ecosystems on which humans depend for clean water and disease prevention, and called for a new international conservation effort.
The new agreement took 4 years to resolve, in part because of delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic (the summit was supposed to take place in Kunming, China, in 2020), but also because of arguments over how to finance conservation efforts. Nations finally agreed that by 2030, funding for biodiversity from all public and private sources must rise to at least US$200 billion per year. This includes at least $30 billion per year, contributed from wealthy to low-income nations. These figures fall short of the approximately $700 billion that researchers say is needed to fully safeguard and restore nature, but represents a tripling of existing donations.
Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), including the DRC, had called for a brand-new, independent fund for biodiversity financing. Lee White, environment minister from Gabon, told Nature that biodiversity-rich LMICs have difficulty accessing the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the current fund held by the World Bank in Washington DC, and that it is slow to distribute funds.
But France and the European Union strongly objected to a new fund, arguing it would take too long to set up. The framework instead compromises by establishing a trust fund by next year under the GEF. The final agreement also calls on the GEF to reform its process to address the concerns of LMICs.
Progress without drastic change
Another sticking point during negotiations was how to fairly and equitably share the benefits of ‘digital sequence information’ — genetic data collected from plants, animals and other organisms. Communities in biodiversity-rich regions where genetic material is collected have little control over the commercialization of the data, and no way to recoup financial or other benefits from them. But countries came to an agreement to set up a mechanism to share profits, the details of which will be worked out by the next international biodiversity summit, COP16, in 2024.
Overall, the deal marks progress toward tackling biodiversity loss, but it is not the drastic change scientists say they were hoping for. “I am not so sure that it has enough teeth to curb the activities that do most of the harm,” Diaz says.
(Sources: Nature)
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