On the agenda is life on earth, in all its forms and diversity. The big question is how far nations will go to stop the disastrous declines underway.
Representatives from more than 175 countries are gathering to negotiate answers, starting on Monday in Cali, Colombia, at what is expected to be the largest United Nations biodiversity conference in history.
How the talks unfold over the next two weeks will help determine, for better or worse, the planet’s future. Biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history, an intergovernmental panel of scientists found in 2019. It estimated that a million species were in danger of extinction. Even many common species are in decline. Bird populations in the United States and Canada, for example, are down almost 30 percent since 1970, with widespread losses among some of the most frequently seen species.
The biggest driver of declines in biodiversity on land is habitat loss, mainly when land is taken for agriculture, the panel found. In the ocean, it’s overfishing. Climate change plays an ever-growing role, and the two crises are intertwined.
Such drastic losses of biodiversity threaten human well-being, scientists warn. Forests filled with birdsong also stash away planet-warming carbon, filter water and create rain. Healthy rivers and oceans run with fish that people need for food. Insects nourish soil and pollinate plants; birds and mammals disperse seeds, plants turn sunshine into food for the rest of us.
“When we destroy biodiversity, we are destroying the very links that help the system to reproduce life,” said Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, who will be presiding over the conference. “What is at stake is actually another wave of extinction, which could be the sixth general extinction on Earth.” The last one wiped out the dinosaurs.
United Nations negotiations — this session is known as COP16, meaning it is the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity — can sometimes feel absurdly bureaucratic and frustratingly toothless. But, participants say, global cooperation is fundamental to tackling issues like biodiversity loss and climate change, sprawling environmental crises that transcend national boundaries. (The next United Nations climate conference, the 29th in that series of COPs, starts in Baku, Azerbaijan, next month.)
The United States is essentially the only country that has not ratified the biodiversity treaty. Nevertheless, it is sending a delegation of several dozen people from the State Department and other agencies. The only other exception is the Holy See, which is also expected to attend.
Here’s what’s expected over the next couple of weeks in Cali.
Putting plans into action
This is the first biodiversity COP since countries reached a landmark agreement in Montreal two years ago. In Cali, the focus is on putting it into action.
The agreement is based on 23 targets to be met by 2030 that, taken together, lay out a road map for what amounts to a new relationship with the natural world. The delegates in Montreal committed to almost eliminating the loss of areas of high biodiversity importance, to halting extinctions, to ensuring that wild species were not overharvested, to reducing pollution effects and much more. One target, known as 30×30, is a pledge to conserve 30 percent of the planet’s land, inland waters and oceans.
Now, in this conference, countries have to submit plans to show how they intend to meet those targets. The plans are due by this meeting.
Advocates for conservation are scrambling to analyze the plans as they come in. They’re also raising alarms that only a small fraction of countries had submitted them before the start of talks. The World Wide Fund for Nature has published a tracker.
“There is a worrying gap between what was promised in Montreal and the plans put in place so far to reverse the loss of nature by 2030,” Bernadette Fischler Hooper, the fund’s head of global advocacy, said in a news release.
At the same time, she acknowledged that change isn’t easy, and that countries were facing multiple challenges, including a lack of funding.
Money, money, money
The countries that are richest in biodiversity tend to have less money to spend on protecting it. In Montreal two years ago, sharp disagreements over financing coursed through the negotiations, occasionally blowing up and threatening the entire endeavor. Ultimately, it was agreed that $200 billion per year would be mobilized by 2030.
Even more was needed. The agreement recognized a biodiversity finance gap of $700 billion per year.
Some of that could be met by reaching another target: Countries agreed to phase out $500 billion per year in subsidies that are harmful to nature — which would presumably include fossil fuels, unsustainable agriculture and commercial fishing — and to scale up positive incentives.
But governments have long struggled to redirect such subsidies. A United Nations report issued in December found that environmentally harmful subsidies had increased by 55 percent, to $1.7 trillion, from 2021 to 2022. This was “driven by fiscal support for fossil fuel consumption,” according to the report.
Finances could again be the most difficult and polarized negotiations of the conference, said David Cooper, deputy executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Another potential source of money will be on the agenda: a proposed fund that companies would pay into for access to digital genetic information. That could raise perhaps $1 billion to a few billion dollars per year for countries and Indigenous communities that safeguard biodiversity, Mr. Cooper said.
And, more generally, countries will weigh the degree to which Indigenous people and local communities are able to access funding directly, rather than through national governments.
‘Peace With Nature’
The theme of the conference is “Peace With Nature,” signifying the need for humans to transform their relationship with the natural world.
“How can we have very prosperous lives, but at the same time that are within the limits of the planet?” Ms. Muhamad said. “What we would like in COP16 is that this question is at the center.”
But for Colombia and many other countries, there is another dimension to the slogan.
Even as environmental protection is a key pillar of President Gustavo Petro’s government, large areas of the Colombian Amazon are under the control of armed rebels, and deforestation has spiked. A group called Estado Mayor Central has “the power to slow or accelerate deforestation at will,” according to a report issued on Friday by the International Crisis Group.
In July, the rebels made what appeared to be a threat against the biodiversity conference before rescinding it a couple of weeks later.
“States don’t have real control over many biodiverse areas,” said Elizabeth Dickinson, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group. “Environmental destruction is a business. We have to face those two hard realities in order to advance.”
Last year, Colombia led in a count of people killed defending the environment. Brazil came in second. They are two of the most biodiverse countries in the world.
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