COP15, a crucial UN summit to set biodiversity protection targets, will finally take place in Montreal in December. The objective of the meeting is to advance the protection of ecosystems and the species that live there, in a context of increasingly marked erosion of biodiversity on a global scale.
This COP15 was first to be held in Kunming, in southwestern China, but the summit will finally be held in Montreal, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) said on Tuesday. China has many anti-COVID restrictions which made it difficult to hold the event in the country.
Initially scheduled for October 2020 in China, the COP15 conference has been postponed many times. A first part, formal, was held in Kunming in October 2021. The second, where the negotiations must end, will finally take place from December 5 to 17 in Quebec, since Montreal is the headquarters of the CBD secretariat.
“Harmony with nature”
The 196 members of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity — 195 states and the European Union, minus the United States — are working on a global framework to “live in harmony with nature” by 2050, with a first step in 2030.
In this text, which some hope is as ambitious as the Paris climate agreement, it is a question of protecting at least 30% of land and oceans by 2030, reducing plastic and agricultural pollution or even ensuring the proper implementation of the objectives adopted.
Time is running out, as States have failed to keep their commitments over the past decade and the degradation of nature, which provides drinking water, air and food, continues at a frantic pace.
crisis of life
Species of mammals which are disappearing more and more rapidly, victims of poaching and the destruction of their natural habitats, populations of birds, amphibians, insects or fish in free fall and once rich ecosystems which are wiped off the map in the name of the spread of human activities… The lights are more red than ever, like the “red list” of the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which identifies endangered species and growing year after year.
In interview at To have to at the beginning of June, the Executive Secretary of the Convention, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, cited as an example the portrait drawn up by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES): no less than one million animal and plant species, out of the estimated eight million on Earth, are threatened with extinction, including “many in the coming decades”.
Human activity is directly involved in the declines observed around the world. Deforestation, intensive agriculture, overfishing, rampant urbanization, poaching, exploitation of non-renewable natural resources: 75% of the terrestrial environment has been “seriously altered” by human activities and 66% of the marine environment is also affected, according to the ‘IPBES.
Canadian ambition
The situation is such that the Canadian Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault, believes that the observations on the severity of the climate crisis are valid to describe the biodiversity crisis. In interview at To have to earlier this month, he also underlined the need to tackle both crises at the same time, in particular because the protection of natural ecosystems, such as forests, is considered “a nature-based solution” to combat global warming. of the climate.
“For too long, these issues have been tackled in silos. But I think one of the great merits of the UK Presidency of the UN Climate Conference in Glasgow in 2021 is breaking down those silos and ensuring that now, when working on protecting biodiversity, we are also working on the fight against climate change and the fight against desertification,” he argued.
The Trudeau government, which is part of the “High Ambition Coalition” for nature, along with nearly a hundred other countries, also hopes that the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity will be an opportunity to raise the international goals. Minister Guilbeault says he hopes that several states will commit, like Canada, to protecting 30% of their natural land and marine environments by 2030. “I have high hopes for a robust agreement. »
Regarding the protection of marine environments, the task promises to be difficult, acknowledged Steven Guilbeault, since barely 7% of these ecosystems are now protected on a planetary scale. “We are starting from afar, there is a lot of work to do. But when we see how quickly projects are emerging, for example in Canada, we see that it is possible. »
In terms of the protection of natural environments, the will of certain States sometimes clashes with the policies of certain governments. Since President Jair Bolsonaro came to power in Brazil, for example, the destruction of the irreplaceable Amazon rainforest has accelerated. Only in April, according to official data, no less than 1000 km2 were razed. And during the period 2020-2021, the Brazilian Amazon (60% of the largest tropical forest on the planet) lost 13,235 km2.
With Agence France-Presse