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).

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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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Reuters

September 21, 2022
World leaders on Tuesday stepped up financial support and conservation commitments to combat the global biodiversity crisis that threatens more than one million plant and animal species with extinction.

On the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly meeting in New York, Germany pledged 1.5 billion euros per year in international biodiversity funding — more than doubling its current commitments.

Nations will soon gather in Montreal, Canada, for a critical U.N. biodiversity summit (COP15) to finalise and adopt a framework to protect and conserve nature.

Over half of the world's GDP depends heavily on the natural world, according to a 2020 report by the World Economic Forum.

The December conference "needs to be a turning point for our conservation efforts", said German Chancellor Olaf Scholz as he announced the new funding. "With this contribution, we want to send a strong signal for an ambitious outcome of the biodiversity COP15."

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Business Green

September 21, 2022
World leaders have stressed the importance of increased funding for conservation efforts, after this week highlighting how the upcoming COP15 Biodiversity Summit in Montreal in December represents an essential opportunity for tackling global biodiversity loss.

Speaking at the Countdown to COP15: Landmark Leaders' Event for a Nature-Positive World event in New York yesterday, a series of world leaders declared the success of COP15 represented a priority for their governments, as they called on countries to work together to secure "an ambitious global biodiversity agreement" in Montreal.

Leaders said an ambitious new global accord was urgently required "in the face of an escalating nature crisis that is threatening health, food security, and livelihoods, while undermining climate action and sustainable development".

Leaders from 93 regions and the European Union reaffirmed their commitment to reverse biodiversity loss and secure a 'nature-positive' world by 2030, throwing their weight behind the global campaign to protect and conserve at least 30 per cent of all land and oceans by 2030.

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The Guardian

September 1, 2022
It is now less than 100 days until Cop15, the UN convention on biological diversity. At these talks, which are taking place in Montreal, Canada in December, governments from around the world will come together to agree targets aimed at halting the destruction of the natural world and protecting biodiversity. With the Earth experiencing the largest loss of life since the extinction of the dinosaurs, what is decided at this meeting could shape the future of the planet and humanity.

Madeleine Finlay speaks to biodiversity reporter Phoebe Weston about how negotiations have been going so far, and what’s next on the road to Cop15.

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The Guardian

August 30, 2022
With only a few short months until Cop15 in Montreal, 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 civilisation. 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.

Every 10 years, governments agree new targets on protecting biodiversity, which they aim to meet by the end of the decade. The last round of targets was agreed at Cop10 in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010, when governments pledged to halve the loss of natural habitats and expand nature reserves to 17% of the world’s land area by 2020, among other targets.

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The Guardian - Opinion

August 30, 2022
They are known as “the twins”, born in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro but diplomatically separated and left to develop at different speeds. One is the UN’s climate change convention, or UNFCCC, now a fully fledged global agreement with huge annual summits attended by heads of state and rock stars pledging to reduce emissions.

The other, the UN convention on biological diversity (CBD), aims to protect the world’s 10 million species of animals and plants, but it meets less often, is modest by comparison, and has yet to make its mark with the public in the same way as climate.

This year, for the first time the “big brother” climate meeting, Cop27, and the “little brother” nature meeting, Cop15, will converge within days of each other before Christmas, albeit 5,600 miles apart, in Egypt and Canada. Both will attract thousands of delegates, lobbyists and non-government groups and there is much optimism that a good result in one will improve the chances of success in the other.

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Eco-Business

August 12, 2022
Biodiversity encompasses the full variety of life – all genes, species and ecosystems – and it is in danger. That means we are too. As this article explains, a major conference in December 2022 could have a big impact on our collective fate by helping to end biodiversity loss and restore nature.

COP15 is shorthand for the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In fact, COP15 includes meetings of parties to three international agreements: the CBD and its two subsidiary protocols, namely the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety and the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing.

The CBD was agreed at the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992. It has three objectives: the conservation of biodiversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources. Some 195 countries and the European Union are now parties to the CBD. The United States is the only member state of the United Nations that has not ratified the agreement. The CBD’s Cartagena Protocol has 173 parties and its Nagoya Protocol has 137.

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Fast Company

August 8, 2022
Navigating the investment landscape is increasingly complex. Supply chain issues, soaring inflation, rising energy prices, spiraling cost of raw materials—the list goes on.

Increasingly, “alarming” levels of global biodiversity loss—or, in investment-speak, the permanent destruction of natural capital—must also be taken into account. In fact, the situation has reached a crisis point where investors are now recognizing the direct line of risk between their portfolios and the natural resources they depend on.

All is not lost. As investors finally start to quantify the risk of global biodiversity loss in terms of dollars, it could spark the level of change that has been so urgently needed for so long. Indeed, investment is now being billed as a key area of debate at the upcoming UN COP-15 summit on biodiversity.

Alongside the significant economic opportunity there is of course also a climate imperative on financial companies to halt the ecological destruction of the Earth. Thankfully, these companies are starting to take notice and establish roots in the movement to reverse biodiversity loss.

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UNDP

August 4, 2022
Reiyia is among leaders fighting for the rights of Indigenous communities and calling for stronger action, as up to 80 percent of the negotiating text in the 20 action targets of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework draft agreement have remained unresolved, threatening progress at the up-coming COP15 conference. While almost 100 countries support the proposal to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and ocean by 2030 under the framework, with the protection of Indigenous rights a critical element of this initiative, countries failed to agree on fundamental issues.

These prominent issues include how much funding would be committed to conserve biodiversity; or what percentage figures the world should strive to protect, conserve and restore to address the extinction crisis. Experts have called for the recognition of the land, territories and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs). Additionally, Indigenous advocates and allies are pushing to secure the free, prior and informed consent of IPLCs in conservation policies as key for the framework to succeed.

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World Economic Forum

July 25, 2022
A recent report from The Environment Agency found a quarter of England’s mammals and almost a fifth of UK plants are threatened with extinction. With only an abysmal 50% of biodiversity remaining, the UK today ranks in the bottom ten of all countries globally. The present situation may look grim, but the future is potentially bleaker if we don’t act fast. The UN predicts the colossal extinction of one million species by 2039 - it’s clear we need to take action now to drive the change in the world, and humanity’s very survival, needs.

The absence of an urgent response from global leaders to the crisis has taken the loss of the world’s biodiversity to a crisis point, as it now poses as great a risk to humanity as global warming. Ongoing deprioritisation over more immediate global problems, such as the cost of living crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic has stagnated action and accelerated the loss of biodiversity. The delaying of the world’s foremost biodiversity conference, the COP15 summit, four times is proof of this. But humanity sleepwalking into extinction is a disaster, even if it takes fifteen years, and is worthy of urgent global attention.

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Diálogo China

July 21, 2022
After two years of postponements and a change in format, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP15 biodiversity talks will now take place in Montreal, Canada, this December. There is still much work to do in the coming months, if countries are to secure a new global agreement on protecting biodiversity in the coming decade.

At the recent UN Ocean Conference, which took place in Lisbon earlier this month, China Dialogue Ocean spoke with Elizabeth Mrema, the CBD’s executive secretary, about progress so far, on why the talks were relocated from China to Canada, and what needs to happen in the run-up to the event.

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