Cision

November 16, 2022
As the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) winds up, Canada is urging the international community to continue collaborating to address the dual crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

Today, during Biodiversity Day COP27, the Honourable Steven Guilbeault, Minister of Environment and Climate Change, announced that Canada is investing up to $855,000 to ensure that not-for-profit environmental groups and Indigenous partners can fully participate in the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15), taking place in Montréal from December 7–19, 2022. Over fifty groups will receive the funding, which is being coordinated by the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, to support their participation in the lead up to the Nature COP and facilitate many important events that will be accessible to the general public.  

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EuroNews

November 16, 2022
The architects of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement have urged world leaders to secure a similar deal on nature at the upcoming COP15 biodiversity conference.

Global warming cannot be limited to 1.5 degrees Celsius without protecting nature, they warn. 

As the COP27 United Nations climate summit enters its final few days, government officials and campaigners are now setting their sights on the high-stakes meeting for nature next month. 

It will take place in Montreal, after host country China postponed the event four times due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

On Wednesday, the architects of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement - which seeks to limit global warming to well under 2 degrees Celsius - issued a statement urging world leaders to secure a similar deal on nature.

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UN Environment Programme

November 15, 2022
The natural world is the centre of life on Earth. Ecosystems – from forests, grasslands and peat bogs to oceans, rivers, savannahs and mountains – provide a vast range of services vital to the survival of humanity. They provide food and fresh water, protect us from disasters and disease, prop up the global economy, and crucially play a central role in tackling the climate crisis.

Tomorrow, discussions at the United Nations Climate Conference (COP27), in Egypt will focus on the critical role of biodiversity to climate action. And this will be high on the agenda again at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Montreal next month.

There, the world will be watching as leaders come together to agree on a new set of global goals for actions through 2040 to protect and restore nature. While COP15 focuses on nature and biodiversity loss, and COP27 on tackling the climate crisis, experts say these issues are deeply entwined, and neither can be solved on their own.

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Campaign for Nature

November 15, 2022

With just one month to go until COP15 begins in Montreal, Canada, the press reported on Thursday, November 10 that there will not be heads of state at COP15.

This is a very concerning situation considering this critical conference seeks to agree on a pathway to curb the collapse of our entire planetary life support system - one million species are at risk of extinction and unless critical ecosystems are urgently protected we could face serious threats not just to the natural world, but to our climate, health, food and clean water supply. 

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The Guardian

November 11, 2022
The outcome of Cop27 will be crucial not just in terms of tackling the climate crisis but to help ensure a future for nature, the UN’s head of biodiversity has said, outlining plans for “a Paris moment for biodiversity” at Cop15 in Montreal in December.

“Clearly the world is crying out for change, watching as governments seek to heal our relationships with nature, with the climate,” said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the convention on biological diversity (CBD), at a media briefing on Thursday. “Scientists have told us in no uncertain terms … that climate change and biodiversity loss are intrinsically connected and that’s why we are looking at the [Cop15] framework as, basically, a Paris moment for biodiversity.”

In Paris in 2015, governments agreed legally binding targets to limit global temperature rises for the first time, pledging to hold global heating to well below 2C, with an aspiration not to breach 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

At the Cop15 summit in December, organised by China but hosted in Canada, governments are expected to agree a UN agreement to halt the destruction of the natural world. Top officials have warned the nature agreement – the UN CBD – depends on strong climate commitments.

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Quartz

October 26, 2022
With little to no progress made in halting and reversing catastrophic biodiversity loss in the past few years, hundreds of companies have stepped up demands for regulations to increase transparency and accountability.

Businesses must be compelled to “assess and disclose their impacts and dependencies on biodiversity by 2030,” more than 330 firms and financial institutions from 56 countries said in an open letter published today (Oct. 26), organized by the Business for Nature coalition and addressed to world leaders. The signatories include Sweden’s furniture giants IKEA, India’s Tata Steel, and French international banking group BNP Paribas, among others.

As some large businesses demand regulations, other big companies have been linked to lobbying attempts to resist such laws. Currently, any biodiversity reportage is largely voluntary and scattered. The statement is urging governments “to transform the rules of the economic game and require business to act now” before COP15 in Montreal in December, where the new Global Biodiversity Framework will be formed.

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Canada’s National Observer

October 25, 2022
With COP15 in Montreal rapidly approaching, governments are gearing up to create targets on biodiversity for the next decade. The world has so far failed to meet any UN targets on halting the loss of nature, yet awareness of the challenge is greater than ever. Here we examine why this UN meeting matters and how it could herald meaningful action on nature loss.

Nature is in crisis and for the past three decades, governments have been meeting to ensure the survival of the species and ecosystems that underpin human civilization. The Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 saw the creation of three conventions: on climate change, desertification and biodiversity. The aim of the convention on biological diversity (CBD) is for countries to conserve the natural world, its sustainable use, and to share the benefits of its genetic resources.

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Reuters

October 25, 2022
There is a lot resting on the diminutive shoulders of Elizabeth Maruma Mrema. The Tanzanian lawyer, chief executive of the Convention on Biological Diversity, will be leading efforts to strike an historic agreement to protect nature at the COP15 biodiversity summit in Montreal in December.

As if that is not enough, she is also co-chair of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), with a goal of creating a framework for companies and investors to report on their nature-related risks: both the impact they have on nature, and their dependencies on nature to conduct their businesses.

Having only been appointed in 2021, she and her co-chair, former Refinitiv founder David Craig, are proceeding at warp speed, aiming to produce a workable version of the TNFD by September next year.

The timetable has been pushed to come just months after what is hoped to be a “Paris moment” for nature at COP15, a reference to the 2015 Paris climate agreement, with 196 countries signing off the Convention on Biological Diversity’s post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF).

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Reuters

October 25, 2022
Over 330 businesses on Wednesday urged world leaders to force large companies to assess and disclose their impact on nature by 2030, ahead of the COP15 global talks on biodiversity in December.

Signatories of the COP15 Business Statement, which include GSK (GSK.L), H&M Group (HMb.ST) and Nestle (NESN.S) and which have combined annual revenues of more than $1.5 trillion, said the world needed to move past voluntary reporting rules.

"Improving the health of our planet requires bold, decisive action from policymakers and businesses. Some progress has been made, but it's not enough," Rebecca Marmot, chief sustainability officer at consumer goods company Unilever (ULVR.L), said.

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idw

October 20, 2022
Ahead of the global meeting of the Conference of the Parties in Montréal, Canada, which decides new targets for nature, the first-ever study of its kind outlines an urgent need for larger numbers and better-supported protected area staff to ensure the health of life on Earth. In a new scientific paper published today in the journal “Nature Sustainability”, an international team of scientists – including two members of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) in Berlin – argue that there are not enough rangers and other staff to manage even the current protected areas around the world.

The authors urge governments, donors, private landowners and NGOs to increase the numbers of rangers and other staff five-fold in order to meet global biodiversity conservation goals that have economic, cultural and ecosystem benefits.

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France24

October 20, 2022
According to the latest report from the World Wildlife Fund, global wildlife populations have declined by a whopping 69 percent over the past 50 years. It's an urgent reminder of what's at stake as world leaders prepare to meet in early December for their biggest biodiversity conference in a decade, with the goal of agreeing to a new framework to protect the world's plants and animals. According to scientist Paul Leadley, the new framework contains all the measures needed to reverse the damage – but world leaders must be convinced to adopt it. Leadley is one of the main contributors to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Watch

The Guardian

October 6, 2022
China has not invited world leaders to a major nature summit being held this year, raising concerns Beijing is downplaying the crucial Cop15 meeting in order not to embarrass Xi Jinping.

In December, governments will finalise a UN agreement to halt the destruction of the natural world at a summit organised by China but hosted in Canada. Because of Beijing’s zero-Covid policy and after several delays, Cop15 was moved to Montreal, the seat of the UN convention on biological diversity. It was meant to take place in Kunming, Yunnan province, in 2020.

The move has meant that China and Canada, who have a tense diplomatic relationship, must work together to organise the conference with the UN. In late September, the Chinese government sent out invitations to Cop15 in its role as president of the meeting, but addressed them only to ministers and NGO heads.

This raises the prospect of no world leaders attending the talks, where targets on biodiversity for the next decade will be created.

Xi, the Chinese president, is not expected to be at the summit and there are fears that organisers are trying to downplay the importance of Cop15 to avoid highlighting his lack of attendance. Several world leaders are understood to have privately expressed a desire to attend.

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Climate Home News

October 5, 2022
Heads of government haven’t been invited to attend an important biodiversity summit in Canada, raising concerns nature is slipping down the global agenda amid fraught geopolitical relations.

The biodiversity conference, or Cop15, is a moment for countries to agree on a global framework to halt the destruction of nature by the end of this decade. Negotiators meet in Montreal, Canada, 7-19 December, to finalise the deal, widely billed as the “Paris Agreement for nature”.

But after four years of talks, the issue has failed to gain the attention of world leaders. First the coronavirus pandemic, then Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and soaring inflation pushed nature conservation down the agenda.

That is unlikely to change as China, which presides over the talks, hasn’t invited political leaders to attend the conference. President Xi Jinping isn’t expected to show up amid deteriorating relations with host Canada.

“As the plans go, we may not have the heads of state and government,” Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, head of UN Biodiversity, told Climate Home News during an event at think tank Chatham House in London.

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The Guardian

October 1, 2022
Saying you’re a biodiversity reporter doesn’t mean much to a lot of people. “What do you actually write about?” they ask. And this is exactly why there should be more journalists on this beat. The nature crisis continues to fly under the radar.

In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, there was a wave of enthusiasm about tackling the great environmental problems, and so governments set up three UN conventions to deal with climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification. Since then, the climate crisis has been treated as separate to the biodiversity crisis, yet there is huge overlap between the two.

Some people think separating them was an error. Both crises have carbon in common. Releasing it as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is driving the climate crisis, but the main building block of biodiversity on our planet – in soil, forests, wetlands, plants and animals – is also carbon. Dealing with each requires us to store carbon in healthy ecosystems, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. You fail on one, you fail on both.

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The Washington Post

September 29, 2022
As temperatures rise and habitats shrink, hundreds of thousands of plant and animal species around the world are at risk of vanishing.

For the first time, the United States is designating a special diplomat to advocate for global biodiversity amid what policymakers here and overseas increasingly recognize as an extinction crisis.

Monica Medina is taking on a new role as special envoy for biodiversity and water resources, the State Department announced Wednesday. She currently serves as the department’s assistant secretary for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs.

The appointment underscores the Biden administration’s desire to protect land and waters not just at home but to also conserve habitats abroad.

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