COP15 on biodiversity | Rich countries are starting to put money on the table

Deadlock continues over funding for the post-2020 global conservation framework at the 15^e United Nations Conference on Biodiversity (COP15), but rich countries announce here and there contributions intended for developing countries.

Canada notably pledged $255 million on Friday to fund four projects aimed at promoting biodiversity while fighting climate change.

“The success of the global biodiversity framework inevitably requires the support and inclusion of developing countries, where most of the world’s biodiversity is found,” said Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Steven Guilbeault.

“Biodiversity loss, like climate change, knows no borders; it is a catalyst for instability, conflict, famine and pandemic,” added Minister of Foreign Affairs Mélanie Joly at her side.

The bulk of the $219 million will go to the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the financial mechanism of the Convention on Biological Diversity, for the next four-year funding cycle, making Canada the 7^e largest contributor to this fund.

The rest of the money will go to a feminist climate action project in West Africa, the Moroccan forestry strategy and the biodiversity component of the United Nations Development Programme.

The announcement follows others made on Thursday by a group of 14 donor countries, which highlighted having doubled their funding for nature for the period 2015-2020 compared to the previous decade and pledged to continue to increase their contributions.

Where to pay the money?

Beyond the amounts required to help developing countries implement nature conservation and restoration measures, the question of the financing vehicle divides the parties.

Developing countries want to create a new global biodiversity fund, while developed countries prefer to use the Global Environment Facility, created 30 years ago.

But the existing fund “will not be sufficient” with the increase in needs, estimates Flora Mokgohloa, deputy director general for biodiversity and conservation in South Africa.

The creation of a new fund would delay the implementation of the new global framework, retorts Virginijus Sinkevicus, Commissioner for the Environment at the European Commission, who proposes instead to improve the effectiveness of the existing fund.

“It took seven to eight years to negotiate the Global Environment Facility,” he says.

The opportunity of a generation

Despite the remaining disagreements, rich countries remain optimistic.

“If we were prepared, on the issue of climate change, to collectively provide $100 billion a year, from all sources, multilateral institutions, private sector, philanthropic sector and of course the public sector, I find it difficult to see how one could not not be ready to do the same for biodiversity,” said Steven Guilbeault, believing that the amount should be of the same order of magnitude.

The member countries of the Coalition for High Ambition for Nature and People reiterated on Friday their determination to include in the final agreement of COP15 the commitment to protect 30% of the lands and seas by 2030, and to secure the means to achieve it.

“We cannot afford to leave Montreal without funding this commitment,” said Zac Goldsmith, UK Overseas, Commonwealth, Energy, Climate and Environment Minister.

Referring to “the opportunity of a generation” to chart the “path to the restoration of nature”, he invited other countries to also join this commitment.

Minister Goldsmith also insists on the need to redirect financing harmful to biodiversity towards solutions allowing the protection of biodiversity, underlining that this is a major source of potential funds.

“The 50 largest food-producing countries spend around $700 billion [des États-Unis] per year to subsidize forms of land use that are sometimes highly destructive,” he lamented.

Reallocating these funds, he said, would “fill the financial gap” that remains.

With The Canadian Press