Montreal hosts COP15 to adopt the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. More than 20,000 people will take part in this international meeting, unprecedented in the history of this Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity. The main mission of this international meeting is to stimulate the means of implementation necessary to support urgent, ambitious and transformative measures of society.
This demonstrates to what extent the international community is mobilizing more than ever, in order to put an end to and reverse the trend towards the impoverishment of biodiversity in order to propose a framework that will allow us to live in harmony with nature.
The targets set for 2030 go in the direction of protecting natural and semi-natural ecosystems, avoiding their fragmentation, reducing pollution from all sources, reducing the pressures exerted on vulnerable ecosystems and facilitate the resilience of living environments to the impacts of climate change.
It is also a question of protecting territories governed or managed by indigenous peoples, taking into account the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Human Rights.
The overall idea is to bring us to a radical change that can allow us to understand that we are all the ecosystems, rivers and territories of which we are a part.
As part of these commitments, the importance of recognizing the role of the rights of nature approach to combating the ecological crisis is on the agenda. In fact, more than 200 organizations and individuals from around more than 40 countries called for the inclusion in the text of the rights of nature or Mother Earth approach, as understood by many Indigenous Nations. This approach in fact pushes to change both the legal framework and the relationship with nature, avoiding continuing with the status quo which facilitates “business as usual”.
Rights of nature and human rights
There are, moreover, concrete proposals that seek to establish a consensus for which civil society and some Member States are asking for particular support for their adoption: that which aims to include the importance of having a holistic vision of nature, to combat this ecological crisis. We also find that of recognizing the approach of the rights of nature, complementary to the approach of human rights, to better respond to the imperatives of establishing a balance between our human needs and the planetary balance.
Note that we already have the first case of recognition of rights to a natural entity in Canada. It is moreover the Mutehekau shipu or Magpie river, on the North Shore of Quebec, which was recognized in 2021 a legal personality and rights. In addition, the Fraser (Sturgeon) River in Canada has also been recognized with rights by the Tsilhqot’in Nation. Legislation has been introduced to recognize this status for the St. Lawrence River, both in the National Assembly and in Ottawa. The Ottawa River is also at the beginning of the process to obtain this status, as well as Lake Winnipeg.
The Global Biodiversity Framework should therefore consider this approach, which seems to combine both the indigenous and non-indigenous vision of nature protection.
Another very important issue to monitor and on which we hope that Canada will also have a leadership role, is the inclusion in several objectives that will be adopted in the text, of the expression Terre-Mère or “Mother Earth”. . The inclusion of this terminology comes specifically from the epistemologies of many Indigenous nations around the world and its inclusion will demonstrate openness to its millennial perspectives.
Moreover, as part of this COP15, the International Observatory for the Rights of Nature is organizing, in partnership with several organizations, including the UN chapter “Living in harmony with nature”, two panels on this subject: one on December 15 at 9 a.m., open to all civil society, in the Living Generations Area, and another on December 17 at 9 a.m. in the Canada Pavilion (blue zone). In these panels, the voices of rivers and natural features that have been granted legal personality or are on the way to this recognition will be presented. This is the case of the St. Lawrence River, the host river which will be in dialogue with the Magpie/Mutehekau shipu river, El Mar Menor in Spain, the Odra river in Poland and the Atrato river in Colombia.
In short, Canada will play a leading role in the negotiations, because it will have to provide leadership and ambition in the means to be taken in the face of the massive loss of biodiversity, for which we are basically responsible as humanity. We sincerely hope that the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework will indeed be ambitious and open to these new perspectives.