After displaying their divisions at COP27 on climate, representatives from around the world meet in Montreal on Wednesday with a new challenge: to resolve their differences in two weeks to approve a historic roadmap capable of safeguarding nature by 2030. .
The 15e conference of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), known as COP15 Biodiversity, opens on December 7 in Canada two years late, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and without any certainty on a credible agreement comes to an end on 19 December.
After three years of laborious negotiations, the points of friction remain numerous between the members of the CBD (195 States and the European Union, but without the United States, however influential observers).
Financing, from North to South, in return for binding ecological commitments, remains to be decided. And Brazil, rich in the Amazon, but whose elected president Lula has not yet taken the reins, is very firm, alongside Argentina, to preserve its agri-food industry.
However, no world leader has announced his arrival in Montreal to weigh in on the negotiations, for lack of an invitation from China, which is presiding over COP15, but has given up hosting the summit when there were more than 110 leaders in Egypt for COP27 Climate.
Yet the two COPs are inseparable: “nature-based solutions could provide around a third of climate mitigation measures and play an essential role in adapting to global warming”, recalls Zoe Quiroz Cullen, of the NGO Fauna & Flora International.
“Success is not guaranteed”, summarizes a European source close to the negotiations.
The ambition remains to seal an agreement on biodiversity as historic as that of Paris for the climate in 2015. But many experts fear a failure similar to that of the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009.
However, time is running out: 70% of the world’s ecosystems are degraded, largely due to human activity, according to reports by IPBES, the UN’s biodiversity experts. More than a million species are threatened with extinction on the planet, which is experiencing, according to some scientists, a “sixth mass extinction” since the appearance of life.
“What is at stake are the foundations of human existence,” warned CBD Executive Secretary, Tanzanian Elizabeth Maruma Mrema. Because “biodiverse and balanced ecosystems ensure climate regulation, soil and food fertility, water purity, modern medicines and the basis of our economies”.
30% of the planet protected?
The delegates of the member countries of the CBD – born at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992 – will resume the debates in Montreal, spurred on by the strong presence of NGOs (WWF, IUCN, etc.), experts and representatives of the economic world. . More than 12,000 people are expected.
The negotiations must establish a “post-2020 global framework”, in other words a roadmap of around twenty objectives to be achieved by 2030. This framework must succeed the “Aichi Objectives” (Japan) adopted in 2010 , but hardly any of which have been fulfilled.
The most prominent goal is to protect 30% of land and seas. More than a hundred countries, including West African states (ECOWAS) and the European Union, support the target.
Reforestation, restoration of natural environments, reduction of pesticides, fight against invasive species, sustainable fishing and agriculture… are also on the list.
To achieve this, money remains a burning issue. Brazil, backed by 22 countries including Argentina, South Africa, Cameroon and Indonesia, has called for wealthy states to provide ‘at least $100 billion a year until 2030’ to developing countries . But the Europeans are reluctant to create yet another fund.
Separately, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) announced on Thursday that public and private investments in Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) are expected to reach $384 billion per year by 2025, more than double the current 154 billion.
The involvement of indigenous peoples, “often the greatest guardians of nature”, will be another key point, the Minister of the Environment of Costa Rica recalled at COP27. “We cannot save biodiversity without partnering with indigenous peoples,” said Franz Tattenbach.
Finally, so as not to repeat the mistakes of the past, the “implementation” of commitments will be a major subject, with clear indicators, insists the European source. “It is their absence that has made the Aichi framework so ineffective. »