Prior to the United Nation’s 29th climate Conference of the Parties (COP) taking place next month in Baku, Azerbaijan, another critically important international meeting is happening this month in Cali, Colombia: the 16th COP of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity. COP16 is the first biodiversity COP since the world’s governments adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), a strategic plan to reverse global biodiversity loss and restore nature by 2050. It is essential that decision-makers at the meeting make concrete advances on the three big issues of finance, implementation, and accountability.
We need significant advances on these issues because the world’s biodiversity—all the variety of animals, plants, fungi, and other forms of life—is in severe decline. A million species are in danger of extinction, threatening human well-being and life as we know it. As Dr. Bob Watson, former chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, said, “Biodiversity and thriving ecosystems are at the heart of our survival, and if we don’t halt and reverse the unsustainable use of nature, we risk not only the future we want, but even the lives we currently lead.” This biodiversity crisis poses a threat that is at least as urgent as the climate crisis. In fact, these dual crises—biodiversity loss and climate change—are deeply intertwined; we cannot successfully stop one without also addressing the other.
Given that interconnectedness, the parallels between the climate COP and biodiversity COP shouldn’t be surprising. Each COP is a vital tool for the global community to coordinate action on an existential threat to human well-being. And each COP faces challenging issues associated with implementation, financing, and accountability.
But there are critical differences as well. While the climate crisis has been on the global agenda for decades—with intense attention from media, policymakers, scientists, activists, and fossil fuel enablers—the biodiversity crisis is less known and less understood. And as climate targets prove to be a challenge for global action, biodiversity conservation targets can be even more daunting as they demand a change in our relationship with nature, implicating humanity’s core conceptions of its place in the natural world.
COP16 will focus on some of these challenges; primary among them:
- How we pay for biodiversity conservation, which is essential for implementing the entire framework. Target 19 of the GBF addresses financing, committing parties to mobilizing at least $200 billion per year by 2030, which should include an increase in resources from developed economies to developing economies to at least $20 billion per year by 2025 and a minimum of $30 billion by 2030. Yet, as assessed by the Paulson Institute, these amounts are not sufficient to close the $700 billion annual biodiversity finance gap, a sum that is used widely by governments when discussing nature financing. In addition to figuring out ways to source and close this funding gap, COP16 needs to explore how global institutions and countries can simplify and streamline the flow of financial resources to developing countries more efficiently and effectively, and how to make sure that the countries and communities who need it the most get access to that funding in a timely manner.
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With the adoption of the GBF, the parties are shifting to the hard work of implementing their commitments. That work includes developing new national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs), which are already falling behind, and adopting a monitoring framework so we can measure progress. Currently, the monitoring framework is inadequate to help us understand if we’re meeting the GBF’s targets. While headline indicators are useful for some targets, others are sorely lacking. Parties must endorse a process to close the gap in the monitoring framework.
Further, development and implementation of new legal mechanisms are necessary to secure conservation throughout the globe. This is particularly true for protecting the world’s ocean. Rapid ratification and implementation of the new high seas treaty, for example, presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity for biodiversity conservation at a global scale, but it must first be ratified by 60 nations and then effectively implemented. The treaty will make it possible to create comprehensive marine protected areas (MPAs) in the ocean beyond national jurisdiction, which constitutes nearly two-thirds of the world’s ocean area and covers nearly half the surface of the planet. Creating large-scale MPAs on the high seas is essential to achieving the goal of protecting 30 percent of the global ocean by 2030 (30×30), a foundational element of Target 3 of the GBF. Thus, swift ratification and implementation of the treaty is a top biodiversity conservation priority.
Another important dimension for effective implementation is strengthening the synergies between the national biodiversity and climate plans. The countries that submitted their NBSAPs ahead of COP16 should make sure that these plans are leveraged to strengthen the ambition of climate actions and are integrated in the next round of national climate plans due by the first quarter of 2025. The 85 percent of countries who missed the deadline need to use the COP16 platform to boost cooperation and multi-stakeholder engagement to ensure that their national biodiversity and climate plans are aligned and mutually reinforcing, so that both the global climate and 30×30 goals stand a chance to be met.
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Finally, parties need to be held accountable for their commitments—and their actions that lead to unintended adverse effects. For example, for years, Global North countries have called on the Global South to protect tropical rainforests. Yet Global North parties have continued to allow the degradation of their own climate- and nature-critical forests, where industrial logging has become the single-largest driver of tree cover loss in the world. COP16 is an opportunity for holding both tropical forest countries and the Global North into account, and for pushing for equitable forest protections globally.
COP16 is also a chance to educate parties on the impacts of forest bioenergy (i.e., bioenergy derived from wood pellets made from trees) on global biodiversity and urge those countries not to rely on or incentivize financially this environmentally destructive energy source. Countries in Europe and Asia that have deemed bioenergy “renewable” or “zero carbon” are increasingly relying upon it to replace fossil fuels, subsidizing it with billions of dollars. However, the established science tells us that industrial-scale forest bioenergy worsens climate change, destroys biodiversity, and harms the communities where wood pellets are produced. Parties should take a strong position against these kinds of false climate solutions and support decisions showing the direct link between forest bioenergy and biodiversity loss and the need to end subsidies and other tax incentives for bioenergy.
Cutting across these issues is the need to build equity at all levels into the solutions. We must ensure that marginalized communities on the frontline—like Indigenous People, descendants of Africans and other people of color, and women—have an equal seat at the table.
These are difficult challenges, but we’ve already made progress: The world has coalesced around a collective strategic plan to reverse global biodiversity loss. Now, we must follow through by working with each other to address the issues above and build a new relationship with nature. Let us remain optimistic that COP16 will be a significant milestone on this journey.
