Biodiversity negotiators face uphill climb at COP15 in Montreal

Police officers patrol outside the Palais de Congres, during the opening of COP15 on Dec. 6, the two-week U.N. biodiversity summit in Montreal.CHRISTINNE MUSCHI/Reuters

Delegates have reached the starting line for COP15 in Montreal, the 15th United Nations conference on biodiversity, where work on a new international agreement to protect nature is set to commence on Wednesday.

But participants say the road ahead is already looking like a steep, uphill climb.

For representatives from 196 countries who are party to the UN Convention on Biodiversity, the central purpose of the meeting is to hammer out a new framework under the convention, with agreed targets to be met by 2030. The previous framework expired in 2020 with none of its targets met.

COP15 was initially intended to take place that year in China, but its completion has been delayed two years by the COVID-19 pandemic and the venue shifted to Montreal.

The conference, taking place at Montreal’s Palais des congrès, is surrounded by numerous side events intended to draw public attention to conservation related issues, including Indigenous rights and the sustainable and equitable sharing of the benefits derived form nature.

Overall, the meeting has been billed as the last best chance to put species and ecosystems on a path to recovery by mid-century. It is also seen as essential for reaching global climate goals under the 2015 Paris Agreement, since those goals depend on a large fraction of the world’s carbon staying locked up in the natural environment.

“This conference couldn’t wait any longer,” said Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change, at a news briefing with Chinese and UN officials on Tuesday morning. “We must act now.”

At the briefing, Elizabeth Mrema, who heads the UN Secretariat for the convention, said a working group that gathered ahead of the formal meeting had made limited progress “but not so much as needed or expected” to produce a coherent version of the framework to pass on to negotiators to finalize during COP15.

The lack of progress places a greater burden on COP15 itself, during which negotiators will need to resolve numerous differences in order to reach an agreement by the time the conference ends on Dec. 19.

Among the issues debated by the working group are how countries should share in the benefits derived from nature, and how the rights of communities to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment should be recognized.

At a separate briefing, Guido Broekhoven, head of policy research and development for the environmental organization WWF International, said the wrangling on the wording around those issues meant that participants in the working group had little time for other fundamental questions, such as how much land and marine areas countries would agree to permanently set aside for the protection of nature.

Canada is among the countries that have committed to a target of setting aside 30 per cent of their territory by 2030, often referred to as “30 by 30.″ The target has yet to be specified in working drafts of the framework.

During the working group meeting “the target of 30 by 30 was not even discussed, and also ambition on restoration was pushed forward to further discussion at the COP itself,” Mr. Broekhoven said.

Another point of contention likely to challenge negotiators at the meeting falls under the category of “resource mobilization,” which includes the money public and private entities will need to spend to ensure that any agreement that emerges from COP15 can be implemented.

An expert report published in 2020 by The Nature Conservancy, a U.S.-based environmental group, found that the financing gap between the amount required to protect global biodiversity and the amount actually spent amounted to roughly US$700-billion per year.

The report also found that much of that gap could be closed by shifting to a more nature-focused deployment of existing resources, including an end to government subsidies that encourage biodiversity loss.

On Tuesday, Inger Andersen, president of the UN Environment Programme, said COP15 is an opportunity nations can ill afford to squander if the goal is to avoid future calamities, including hunger, disease and death through the continued degradation of nature in its role as the planet’s life support system.

“It’s absolutely critical that negotiators realize it’s down to the wire now,” Ms. Andersen said. “It’s time to come under the big tent … It’s now time for everyone to move a little.”

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