Federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault admitted on Friday that the progress made so far at COP15 in Montreal is not going as fast as he would like.
After nearly a week of deliberations, negotiators reached agreement on three of 22 objectives, including one of Canada’s key objectives: to ensure that Indigenous peoples are consulted and have a role in new conservation agreements.
But Mr Guilbeault admits he was hoping more deals could be struck before more environment ministers start arriving next week for that international UN meeting on saving the biodiversity of the planet.
“There are a lot of things that the negotiators could deal with before the ministers arrive and that is what we are asking them to do,” he said on Friday morning.
COP15, which brings together 17,000 delegates in the heart of Montreal, is trying to establish specific objectives for the preservation of the Earth’s ecosystems. Although 120 of the more than 190 countries present agreed on targets such as conserving 30% of the planet’s land and water by 2030, an agreement remains uncertain.
But Mr. Guilbeault, who has participated in more than twenty high-level environmental conferences in his career, as an environmental activist and then a minister and a politician, said on Friday that he remained hopeful.
Delegates have until Monday to “clean up the text”, he said Friday morning. And if they don’t, the politicians will have to do it themselves next week. “If we get a text that isn’t as clean as we would like, that means ministers will have even more work to do. »
Environmental activists hoped that this COP15 will conclude with a “Montreal agreement” on biodiversity, like the “Paris agreement” on the reduction of greenhouse gases, at the end of the 2015 climate conference. .
The two issues are intimately linked. Scientific research has concluded that there is no chance of keeping climate change at 1.5°C without a 30% level of biodiversity conservation.
Scientists also say this is the minimum needed to maintain the natural systems essential to human life, from clean water to pollinating crops.
Canada has four main targets at this COP15. He wants an agreement to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, to protect at least 30% of land and oceans in the same timeframe, to fund developing countries adequately to enable them to achieve the same objectives, and to include Aboriginal participation.
More than 190 countries are present in one way or another at this conference, which runs until December 19 at the Palais des Congrès in Montreal.