Short Wave - Can COP 15 Save Our Planet's Biodiversity?

Episode Date: December 22, 2022

This week, the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP 15) wrapped up in Montreal, Canada. Nations from around the world came together to establish a new set of goals to help preserve the planet's biodiversity and reduce the rate of loss of natural habitats. The last time biodiversity targets were set was in 2010, at COP 10. In the 12 years since, the world collectively failed to meet any of those biodiversity benchmarks.Aaron Scott talks to Giuliana Viglione, an editor at Carbon Brief covering food, land and nature. She shares what she saw on the ground at COP 15, what the new goals for 2030 are, and why she has more hope that progress will be made this time around. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, this is Aaron Scott. Earlier this week, COP15 wrapped in Montreal with a big agreement, and here to tell us about it is Giuliana Viglione, an editor at Carbon Brief covering food, land, and nature. Welcome to Shortwave, Juliana. Thanks for having me. So COP15 is the U.S. conference focused on biodiversity,

and it is not to be confused with COP27, which is the climate conference that, recently happened in Egypt. Cop 27 had just constant media coverage and there were presidents and other heads of state that flew in. Cop 15, not so much. Juliana, do you have a sense of why this cop just seems, I don't know, less popular? Yeah, it's really interesting. And I think, like, as a whole, biodiversity loss just gets a lot less attention than climate change. And I think one of the issues with biodiversity in particular is it's much less tangible, right? Like, we can hear about there's a million species that are at threat of extinction. But we see the effects of climate change

every day. They're happening to people all around the world. We see them in heat waves. We see them in floods. And so it's much less visceral, right? The loss of a species of insect that you've never heard of in a in a country that you've never been to. But it's also sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, right? Like the the world leaders don't come. So then the media doesn't cover it. So then no one hears about it. So then the politicians don't care and the world leaders don't come. And it just sort of goes around and around. So the last major biodiversity conference happened in 2010 in Japan. And nations came together. They agreed on, I believe, 20 goals that they were going to achieve. by 2020 called the Aichi biodiversity targets.

What were the main targets? So Aichi had five strategic goals and 20 targets. And some of these targets were about, you know, making people aware of the value of biodiversity and sort of integrating it into planning on national scales. Having the rate of loss of natural habitats, that was a big one. and sort of sustainably managing how we use biodiversity, so how we harvest fish, for example. You know, some other ones included trying to minimize the impacts of climate change and ocean acidification on ecosystems,

protecting certain amounts of land and ocean, and preventing extinctions of known threatened species. But there was no mechanism for implementation. There was no teeth in the agreement. And so the world collectively failed to meet a single one of these. Country by country, some of the countries, some nations did achieve specific goals, but on the whole, across the globe, zero. And so this conference, COP15, was supposed to agree and did agree to the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. So that's the new set of rules with a new set of targets, a new set of goals, a new ambition and implementation to, again, try to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by the end of this decade. If you talk to a campaigner or a NGO, they would say, like, you know, nothing less than the future of the world is at stake.

And it's really true. Like the mission of this framework that they agreed at the cop was to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. That's like a huge lofty goal that the world has just agreed to strive for. So today on the show, Juliana will walk us through what happened at this biodiversity conference, the deal that came out of it, and why it's just as important to talk about biodiversity as it is to talk about climate change. I'm Aaron Scott, and you're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science Podcasts from NPR. Juliana, we're now in what's often called the sixth extinction, and it seems like every couple of months there's a new study with bad news about declining biodiversity. To start out, can you just give us a brief overview of why biodiversity is important and kind of what are the big things threatening it?

I mean, from a sort of global view, right, biodiversity is the health. health of our planet. And so we should care about that as beings on this planet. And it's really the fault of humanity that we're in this situation. We rely on biodiversity for everything. We rely on it for our food, for clean water, for clean air. Nature helps take out some of the carbon dioxide that we're emitting into the atmosphere. So scientists have identified five main drivers of biodiversity loss. So the biggest one, or the most visible one, is habitat destruction. So that's deforestation. That's encroaching on wild habitats. The second one is exploitation of resources. So overfishing is a great example of how, you know, we're harming biodiversity by overuse of the

Earth's resources. Third one is climate change. A fourth one is pollution. So, the pollutants that we spew out into the air, and also a really important one is in pesticide use and nutrient runoff from overuse of fertilizers. And then invasive species are actually the fifth main driver of biodiversity loss. And again, these are all sort of connected, right? Like habitat destruction also fuels climate change, and climate change fuels the spread of invasive species. Right. So we're facing this just monster spider web of problems. And I'm guessing there's a thousand ways we can go about addressing each one of those problems,

which in the case of a cop means politics. So, Juliana, you painstakingly tracked the language of the plan as these countries debated over every single sentence and every word even. Tell us about some of the main sticking points. Coming into the conference, there were. hundreds of areas of disagreement in that framework. So some of the main ones were around ambition. So there were countries that were pushing for stronger targets, right? We want to conserve 50% of the Earth's land surface by 2030. Another one was implementation. So how are we

going to make sure that countries are fulfilling their promises under this new framework. And can we get them to, they call it ratchet up the ambition, right? So taking stock of where you are and then making a more ambitious pledge a few years down the line. And then the big one was resource mobilization, which is a fancy way to say money. Most of the world's biodiversity is held in lower income countries. So if we're asking them as, you know, developed countries who have torn our own biodiversity to shreds, if we're asking them to implement these ambitious pledges, who's going to pay to protect their nature? My understanding is it was a bit of a nail bit of a nail biter that, you know, up until the day or two before,

it was supposed to wrap up, there was still a long ways to go. Tell us about that final push and kind of the agreement that everybody came to. Yeah, it was a real roller coaster. Like a few days before the end, we were starting to hear whispers of like, well, what if they don't reach an agreement here? Like, what's that? What are we going to do next? Is that the biggest deal? And then 12 hours later, it was like, oh, we're hearing that the deal may be adopted tonight. And the, like, so much of that happened behind the scenes, right? Like, we don't necessarily know how that final deal was brokered. But yeah, it was just this like whirlwind of emotion.

And that's just like from me as someone who was on the ground covering the conference. You know, when the, when the final deal was approved, there were people who were in tears, right? people who have poured four more years of their life into advocating for this agreement. And to see it happen was like, yeah, just so cool. Wow. That just sounds like an incredible moment to experience, Juliana. So tell us about the deal that they all finally agreed to. What's in it? The big headline one is commonly known as 30 by 30. So that's protecting 30% of the Earth's land and 30% of the Earth's oceans by the year 2030.

That was pushed by a lot of countries in the run-up to the summit, but there was also a sense at some points in the negotiation that that was really just sucking up all the energy. But that's just one target. And there's 22 others that are all equally important to achieving the goals of the framework. So some of the other ones include how are we going to finance this deal? Repurposing subsidies. That was a really interesting fight, actually. So a report that came out earlier this year found that something close to $2 trillion of money worldwide go to what they deemed harmful subsidies. So that's subsidizing fossil fuels, subsidizing industrial agriculture and fisheries.

And so one of the fights in Montreal was language around eliminating these harmful subsidies. And, Julianna, I know that there was some pushback against the 30 by 30 idea with the idea that it wasn't really acknowledging indigenous rights to land and that it would maybe be used like a lot of conservation policies to push people off land. Can you talk about how that conversation played out and how indigenous rights were. incorporated into these agreements. So a lot of times historically, conservation from a Western perspective has involved pushing indigenous peoples off their lands, you know, building a national park and saying like this area is now conserved, you were doing it wrong, we're doing it right. And there has been a growing recognition that actually indigenous peoples are stewards of most of the world's biodiversity. And I think that was reflected to an extent in the text. There are

several places where indigenous rights and respect for indigenous traditions and lands were acknowledged. There's actually a whole target on the rights of indigenous peoples, but it does remain to be seen how countries will implement these targets, and in particular targets around area-based conservation, so saying we need to conserve this amount of land. And so I think it was nearly 200 nations came together, signed this, which is super encouraging. The United States was one of two countries who didn't sign it, which is not so encouraging. Maybe not so surprising is I don't think we're even a participant, correct, because we've not signed previous agreements.

That's correct. So the U.S. is one of two countries that is not party to the Convention on Biological Diversity. There are 196 parties, and it's just the U.S. and the Holy See or the Vatican that are not parties to the agreement. So as you mentioned, we kind of completely failed to meet the goals of the last agreement. How is this going to be different? Do they put in some sort of monitoring or guardrails or incentives or consequences? to ensure that nations are moving towards these targets? Yeah, so there's sort of a tentative optimism among observers of the process that this deal will be able to succeed. But it does all hinge on the implementation step. And the sense I get is that it's not as strong as it could have been.

So it calls for voluntary review and ratcheting of ambition, whereas, you know, a stronger deal might have mandated those reviews. But there is genuine optimism that this deal will achieve where the ICHI targets failed. Excellent. Excellent. We love to end with a little bit of optimism. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us, Juliana. Thanks, Aaron.

This episode was produced by Margaret Serino and edited by our senior supervising editor, Giselle Grayson. Abbey Levine, check the facts. Our audio engineer was Catherine Silva. Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator. Beth Donovan is our senior director of programming, and Anya Grundman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Aaron Scott. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.