Associated Press

March 14, 2022
Nearly all the world’s countries kicked off a U.N.-backed meeting Monday aimed at preventing the loss of biodiversity — seen as critical to avoiding the extinction of many vulnerable species, the emergence of pathogens like the coronavirus, and the damage to both lives and livelihoods of people around the world, Indigenous peoples in particular.

The two-week meeting of over 190 countries on the Convention on Biological Diversity, after a two-year delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic, will be the last gathering of its kind before a major conference in the coming months in Kunming, China, that will try to adopt an international agreement on protecting biodiversity.

“We have this one goal, which is to bend the curve on biodiversity loss and really to build that shared future to live in harmony with nature in the long term,” the convention’s executive secretary, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, told reporters Monday.

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France24

March 14, 2022
UN biodiversity negotiations began in Geneva on Monday to hammer out a global deal to better protect nature that is due for approval later this year.

Almost 200 countries are due to adopt a global framework this year to safeguard nature by mid-century from the destruction wrought by humanity, with a key milestone of 30 percent protected by 2030.

"The world is clearly eager for urgent action to protect nature," said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, in a press release.

"And we have no time to spare. Together we must ultimately deliver a truly historic agreement that puts us firmly on the path to living in harmony with nature."

Talks, which run from March 14 to 29, will set the stage for a crucial United Nations COP 15 biodiversity summit, initially due to be held in Kunming, China in 2020 and postponed several times because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The Geneva meeting will announce new dates for COP 15, which is currently slated for April to May but is expected to be delayed again.

According to several sources, the new dates envisaged are from the end of August to the beginning of September.

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Business Standard

March 14, 2022
After a two-year delay, negotiators from more than 190 countries are gathering in Geneva on Monday for a fortnight-long critical discussions around a global strategy to help stem the tide of biodiversity loss.

This is the last time countries will discuss the agreement, known as the post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), before the Convention on Biological Diversity's (CBD) 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP15).

The Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework has been called the biodiversity equivalent of the Paris Climate agreement.

"The world is clearly eager for urgent action to protect nature," said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. "And we have no time to spare. Together we must ultimately deliver a truly historic agreement that puts us firmly on the path to living in harmony with nature."

Scientists have issued repeated warnings about the dangerous decline in biodiversity. A landmark 2019 global biodiversity assessment found that "nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history -- and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely".

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Phys.org

March 11, 2022
Global efforts to cut plastic and agricultural pollution, protect a third of wild spaces, and ultimately live "in harmony with nature" will dominate UN biodiversity negotiations starting Monday, held in person after a two-year pandemic delay.

Almost 200 countries are due to adopt a global framework this year to safeguard nature by mid-century from the destruction wrought by humanity, with a key milestone of 30 percent protected by 2030.

The aim is also to safeguard the "services" nature supplies: the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil that yields the food we eat. 

The meeting in Geneva will set the stage for a crucial UN biodiversity summit, initially due to be held in China in 2020 and postponed several times. It is now expected to take place at the end of August.

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Euronews

March 10, 2022
The CDP event celebrates the companies and cities which are working to achieve greater sustainability, and the highlights are being broadcast on Euronews, in a special programme hosted by Méabh McMahon.

NGOs worldwide have called for the Earth to become 'nature positive' by 2030, a goal leaders of the G7 group of industrialised countries have endorsed. Nature positivity entails halting and reversing today’s catastrophic loss of nature and biodiversity.

2030 is a crucial deadline, Elizabeth Mrema, Executive Secretary at the Convention on Biological Diversity told Euronews, because “what is at stake is the loss of biodiversity reaching unprecedented rates in the history of mankind.”

“We need to see a better integration of nature and climate change in decision-making on an equal footing at the national level,” she argued, adding: “No time to waste. Scientists have told us we either take action now or perish.”

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Nature

January 19, 2022

Biodiversity is being lost at a rate not seen since the last mass extinction. But the United Nations decade-old plan to slow down and eventually stop the decline of species and ecosystems by 2020 has failed. Most of the plan’s 20 targets — known as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets — have not been met.

The Aichi targets are part of an international agreement called the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, and member states are now finalizing replacements for them. Currently referred to as the post-2020 global biodiversity framework (GBF), the new targets are expected to be agreed this summer at the second part of the convention’s Conference of the Parties (COP15) in Kunming, China. The meeting was due to be held in May, but is likely to be delayed by a few months. Finalizing the framework will be down to government representatives working with the world’s leading biodiversity specialists. But input from social-science researchers, especially those who study how organizations and governments work, would improve its chances of success.

A draft of the GBF was published last July. It aims to slow down the rate of biodiversity loss by 2030. And by 2050, biodiversity will be “valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people”. The plan comprises 4 broad goals and 21 associated targets. The headline targets include conserving 30% of land and sea areas by 2030, and reducing government subsidies that harm biodiversity by US$500 billion per year. Overall, the goals and targets are designed to tackle each of the main contributors to biodiversity loss, which include agriculture and food systems, climate change, invasive species, pollution and unsustainable production and consumption.

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The Guardian

October 28, 2021
Nearly two years after the first reported case of Covid-19, the world is still facing the repercussions. At the same time, the extent of our planetary emergency – of climate crisis, biodiversity loss and inequality – has become evident. As we rebuild our societies and economies, we are faced with a unique opportunity to build a nature-positive future that we must not let slip away. It is time for all of us to chart a planetary response to our planetary crisis – a response that puts nature at the centre.

Our shared global experience with Covid-19 has underlined the interconnectedness of our different systems. The science is clear: climate, biodiversity and human health are fully interdependent. Yet, within discussions around post-Covid recovery, nature is not yet recognised enough as an essential piece in the puzzle of a resilient future for all.

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Thomson Reuters Foundation - OpEd

October 26, 2021
Last week, leaders from around the world came together at a global summit to negotiate a comprehensive plan to safeguard nature around the world. 

Whether the resulting global strategy, expected to be finalized in 2022, is sufficiently ambitious and successful will be influenced by one item: the degree to which countries put advancing human rights, in general, and the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, in particular, at the heart of their plans and real actions.

Science has recently shown what many of us have always known, that indigenous peoples and local communities have historically been and still are the best stewards of nature. Biodiversity is declining less on indigenous lands and traditional territories than elsewhere in the world, and an outsized proportion of the world’s remaining biodiversity is found in these areas. 

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China Dialogue

October 19, 2021
The first session of the most important global biodiversity meeting in a decade was held in Kunming between 11 and 15 October, in an in-person and online hybrid format. 

The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) launched a new stage in talks towards a global deal for nature – known as the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. China, as host nation, is ushering the CBD towards a roadmap for biodiversity conservation for the coming decade and beyond. Delegates to the talks were in agreement: the Aichi targets set in 2010 have been missed, but Kunming cannot be allowed to fail.

The Covid-19 pandemic has hampered progress towards the post-2020 framework, with proceedings delayed or forced online. At meetings of two subsidiary bodies to the CBD in May and June, network issues excluded most African nations from online discussions, leading them to request some matters be renegotiated in January next year. 

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Canada’s National Observer

October 15, 2021

In the run-up to the UN’s crucial climate conference at month’s end, global leaders have laid the foundation for an international framework to protect nature and halt the collapse of biodiversity worldwide while also curbing global warming and protecting human health.

More than 100 nations committed to the Kunming Declaration on Wednesday, a promise to put the natural world on a path to recovery by 2030.

The world is in a dire situation, facing an era of unprecedented species extinction, said COP15 president and China’s Environment Minister Huang Runqui.

As many as a million species of animals and plants are at peril in coming decades, according to a UN report.

The fate of the natural world and humanity are intertwined, Huang said.

“Biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation pose major risks to human survival and sustainable development.”

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BusinessGreen

October 15, 2021
The first phase of the COP15 Biodiversity Summit in Kunming, China closed today with the UN expressing confidence the week long talks had helped set the stage for the adoption of a new international treaty next year to ramp up global biodiversity protection.

The latest round of virtual talks delivered a wave of new funding pledges for nature protection and broad political support for a new set of global targets that would serve to curb rates of biodiversity loss over the next decade.

The COP15 Summit had been scheduled to take place this week with diplomats hoping it would finalise a new set of global targets for nature protection and restoration that would provide a boost to the parallel climate negotiations set to get underway at the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow next month.

However, the coronavirus crisis forced a second postponement of the global talks, with the UN and Chinese hosts staging a virtual round of talks this week ahead of the conclusion of the summit in person next spring.

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New Strait Times

October 14, 2021
At a meeting of Parties to the United Nation's Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in the southern Chinese city of Kunming, world governments are looking ahead to the adoption of new goals and targets for nature to be met this decade: CBD's "Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework" (GBF).

The draft framework lays out broad actions to help transform society's relationship with biodiversity and fulfil a previously agreed shared vision of "living in harmony with nature" by 2050.

This week's online summit Part One sets the stage for a decisive face-to-face meeting in April. Among the new targets is one advanced by the Campaign for Nature (CFN): protect 30 per cent of the world's land and marine areas by 2030.

These should consist of protected areas and "other effective area-based conservation measures" (OECMs), such as territories inhabited by indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs).

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The Guardian

October 14, 2021
The calls for biodiversity and the climate crisis to be tackled in tandem are growing. “It is clear that we cannot solve [the global biodiversity and climate crises] in isolation – we either solve both or we solve neither,” says Sveinung Rotevatn, Norway’s climate and environment minister, with the launch in June of a report produced by the world’s leading biodiversity and climate experts. Zoological Society of London senior research fellow Dr Nathalie Pettorelli, who led a study on the subject published in the Journal of Applied Ecology in September, says: “The level of interconnectedness between the climate change and biodiversity crises is high and should not be underestimated. This is not just about climate change impacting biodiversity; it is also about the loss of biodiversity deepening the climate crisis.”

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EuroNews

October 14, 2021
Around 195 countries signed a pledge on Wednesday to come up with an “ambitious and transformative” plan to prevent our planet from losing its biodiversity.

Meeting as part of the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, also known as COP15, they took on what has been called the defining challenge of this decade.

Named after the city in China where this conference is taking place, the Kunming Declaration signals a change in momentum. It is hoped that this first part of the summit will allow countries to come up with an agreement similar to the Paris Accords - but for the protection of biodiversity rather than climate change.

That agreement is expected to be finalised at the second half of the conference next year.

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The New York Times

October 14, 2021

As 20,000 government leaders, journalists, activists and celebrities from around the world prepare to descend on Glasgow for a crucial climate summit starting late this month, another high-level international environmental meeting got started this week. The problem it seeks to tackle: A rapid collapse of species and systems that collectively sustain life on earth.

The stakes at the two meetings are equally high, many leading scientists say, but the biodiversity crisis has received far less attention.

“If the global community continues to see it as a side event, and they continue thinking that climate change is now the thing to really listen to, by the time they wake up on biodiversity it might be too late,” said Francis Ogwal, one of the leaders of the working group charged with shaping an agreement among nations.

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