Reuters

July 12, 2021
KUALA LUMPUR (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Securing an ambitious new global pact to protect nature at a U.N. biodiversity summit later this year will require stronger political leadership from host nation China, officials and observers have warned.

About 195 countries are expected to agree the text of a new treaty to safeguard the planet’s plants, animals and ecosystems, similar to the Paris climate accord, at U.N. talks scheduled for October in the southern Chinese city of Kunming.

But the prospects of sealing a deal at the COP15 summit - already postponed twice due to the COVID-19 pandemic - are dwindling unless in-person talks can happen, U.N. officials say.

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Campaign For Nature

July 12, 2021
Officials released today “Draft 1” of a global biodiversity framework--known as the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF)--that includes three elements critical to addressing catastrophic biodiversity loss and the extinction crisis: a target to protect at least 30% of the world’s land and ocean by 2030, a target to retain intact natural areas, and a commitment to respect Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ rights over their lands, territories and resources.

Nature is in a state of crisis, which poses a threat as serious as climate change to the future of humanity. Evidence shows that the ongoing and rapid loss of natural areas across the world poses a grave threat to the health and security of all living things.   

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Thomson Reuters Foundation

June 16, 2021
By now you've probably heard of COP26 - the shorthand name for the next major U.N. climate summit, rescheduled for November in Glasgow after being delayed a year by the coronavirus pandemic.

But another big "Convention of the Parties" (COP) is taking place a month earlier - one that is far less talked about but also critically important. That is COP15: the U.N. biodiversity summit planned for China in October.

Efforts to protect the natural world have yet to achieve the same high profile as those to limit climate change, despite advocacy by naturalist David Attenborough and many others.

Losses of crucial ecosystems like rainforests and wetlands, as well as animal species, have accelerated even as governments, businesses, financiers and conservation groups seek effective ways to protect and restore more of the Earth's land and seas.

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The China Dialogue

June 16, 2021
A lot of money is needed to prevent spiralling biodiversity loss; somewhere between US$598 billion and US$824 billion a year, according to the Nature Conservancy and Paulson Institute. The good news is that around half of that could be met with existing finance, redirected from activities that damage nature to those that enhance it.

The bad news is countries already agreed to do this in 2010, but most failed to even identify what subsidies they were promoting that caused problems, never mind reform them. The value of subsidies that harm biodiversity has been estimated to be five or six times higher than finance for promoting conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity.

The issue is still very much alive. The draft text of the Kunming agreement – the successor to the failed 2010 Aichi targets – includes a target to reform subsidies, and eliminate those that are most harmful to biodiversity so that incentives are positive or at least neutral for biodiversity by 2030. The EU’s 2030 Biodiversity Strategy published last year also supports phasing out subsidies that harm biodiversity.

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The Leaflet

May 24, 2021
In October 2021, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet in China to adopt a new post-2020 global biodiversity framework to reverse biodiversity loss and its impacts on ecosystems, species and people. The conference is being held during a moment of great urgency: According to a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, we now have less than 10 years to halve our greenhouse gas emissions to stave off catastrophic climate change. At the same time, climate change is exacerbating the accelerating biodiversity crisis. Half of the planet’s species may face extinction by the end of this century.

And tragically, according to a UN report, “the world has failed to meet a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems in the last decade.”

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Vox

May 20, 2021
As President Joe Biden moves quickly to reinstate the full slate of environmental policies weakened by former President Donald Trump, including the landmark Migratory Bird Treaty Act, he’s signaling that climate change and biodiversity loss are now major priorities for the US.

Earlier this month, the Interior Department also launched a campaign to conserve 30 percent of US land and water by 2030, joining more than 50 other countries that have committed to that goal. Biden is pursuing the target, known as 30 by 30, alongside a new and more ambitious commitment to cut carbon dioxide emissions.

Yet there’s one big problem with this post-Trump environmental renaissance: The US still hasn’t joined the most important international agreement to conserve biodiversity, known as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). And it isn’t just a small, inconsequential treaty. Designed to protect species, ecosystems, and genetic diversity, the treaty has been ratified by every other country or territory aside from the Holy See. Among other achievements, CBD has pushed countries to create national biodiversity strategies and to expand their networks of protected areas.

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Euractiv - OpEd

May 6, 2021
This autumn, world leaders and top scientists will be heading to the UN Biodiversity summit in Kunming, Yunnan Province, China. The summit, also known as COP15, is the epicentre of global biodiversity governance.

Originally scheduled for October 2020, the meeting was postponed due to the pandemic, a crisis highlighting the disruptive entanglement of humans and nature.

It is time for political leaders to demonstrate their courage and resolve: this COP15 meeting must be the “Paris moment” for nature. Although biodiversity and nature loss has not yet achieved the level of political response that led to the Paris Agreement, species loss is increasingly recognised as a global challenge just as significant as, and highly related to, climate breakdown.

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Mongabay

April 20, 2021
2020 was supposed to be the year for evaluating the past decade’s progress in meeting biodiversity conservation targets and setting the agenda for the next decade. But then the pandemic hit, plunging the world into hardship and uncertainty, prompting postponements of global meetings, and pushing biodiversity to the back of most people’s minds. But the nature of a pandemic brought on by a zoonotic virus had an unexpected effect: It catalyzed much greater awareness that human health is underpinned by a healthy planet. This realization sparked a surge in interest in concepts like the “One Health” approach to manage ecosystems, wildlife and livestock, and economies to promote resilience and reduce the risk of disease transmission from animals to people. Today, actors ranging from CEOs to politicians to celebrities are talking up the importance of biodiversity.

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The Guardian

March 18, 2021
A key United Nations summit to negotiate an accord for nature similar to the Paris climate agreement has been postponed for a second time, it has been announced.

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) said in a statement that Cop15, the biggest biodiversity summit in a decade, had been moved to October due to delays related to the coronavirus pandemic. The negotiations in Kunming, China, had been scheduled for May after they were moved from October 2020.

Countries are expected to reach an agreement over targets to protect the natural world, including proposals to conserve 30% of the world’s oceans and land by 2030, introduce controls on invasive species and reduce plastics pollution.

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SciDev.Net

March 10, 2021
Biotechnology, indigenous knowledge, climate change and banana trees. This week, Africa Science Focus sits down with United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity executive secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema to discuss biodiversity and environment on the continent.

With the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration officially launching in June, local solutions and innovations will play a leading role in driving sustainable development in Sub-Saharan Africa, Mrema says.

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NewEurope

March 4, 2021
On the occasion of the World Wildlife Day, the European Commission reiterated its invitation on March 3 to all world institutions to raise their voices to build the momentum for nature and help convince more governments to be ambitious at the crucial Fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CoP 15) later this year.

“Humanity is destroying nature at an unprecedented rate, and we risk losing nearly 1 million species,” Commission Executive Vice-President for the European Green Deal Frans Timmermans said. “This is a direct threat to our own health and wellbeing, as we are fully dependent on the planet’s rich web of life. We must urgently restore balance in our relationship with nature and reverse biodiversity loss. Action starts with awareness and the work done via coalitions like ‘United for Biodiversity’ is crucial to help put our natural environment on the path to recovery,” he added.

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The Guardian

February 22, 2021
When it comes to the environment, few countries rival Costa Rica in terms of action and ambition.

The tiny Central American nation is aiming for total decarbonisation by 2050, not just a “net zero” target. It has regrown large areas of tropical rainforest after suffering some of the highest rates of deforestation in the world in the 1970s and 1980s. Costa Ricans play a major role in international environmental politics, most notably Christiana Figueres, who helped to corral world leaders into agreeing the Paris accord.

Now Costa Rica has turned its attention to securing an ambitious international agreement on halting biodiversity loss. In January, more than 50 countries committed to the protection of 30% of the planet’s land and oceans as part of the High Ambition Coalition (HAC) for Nature and People, spearheaded by Costa Rica, which is a co-chair alongside France and the UK.

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Thomson Reuters Foundation - Op-Ed

February 18, 2021
The crisis facing nature has never been more apparent. The costs to mankind of our degradation of the natural world have never been more evident. Fortunately, the beginnings of a meaningful response – in the form of a post-2020 global biodiversity framework – is close at hand. 

But, for that framework to succeed, governments must ensure broad participation in its formal processes. Non-state actors – sub-national governments, business and the financial sector, academia, civil society, youth and indigenous peoples and local communities – have a critical role to play in delivering biodiversity outcomes. 

There is no denying the urgency of the challenge. As the IPBES Global Assessment warned, an estimated one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction. WWF’s Living Planet Report found that global wildlife is in freefall. 

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Euractiv

February 15, 2021
With a UN biodiversity summit approaching in spring, 2021 has been hailed as a super year for biodiversity. As part of its contribution, the European Commission is preparing legislation to introduce legal protection for 30% of land and sea in Europe.

A UN summit in China, scheduled for May this year, will discuss global action on biodiversity, with the European Union promoting the idea of a Paris Agreement for biodiversity.

The summit comes at a critical time for the world’s nature. Globally, scientists have warned that one million out of eight million species are threatened with extinction.

In Europe, the latest State of Nature report, published in October 2020, warned that biodiversity is in critical decline. Produced by the European Environment Agency, the report showed that over 60% of species have a “poor” or “bad” status, with the most endangered being fish and amphibians.

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BusinessGreen

February 11, 2021
Putting off action to protect biodiversity will double the cost and result in the extinction of many more species when compared to acting now to curb global impacts, according to sobering findings published by Vivid Economics and the Natural History Museum this morning. 

The Urgency of Biodiversity Action study - which was submitted as evidence to the landmark Dasgupta Review on the Economics of Biodiversity - compares the costs and impacts of acting now to prevent the rapid decline of biodiversity loss with a scenario where stronger actions to conserve nature are deferred until 2030.

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