The Guardian

August 27, 2022
The latest round of talks at the United Nations aimed at securing protections for marine life in international waters that cover half the planet ended without agreement Saturday.

The fifth round of discussions, which began two weeks ago, were designed to establish a UN Ocean Treaty that would set rules for protecting biodiversity in two-thirds of the world’s oceanic areas that lie outside territorial waters.

But UN members failed to agree on how to share benefits from marine life, establish protected areas, or to prevent human activity with life on the high seas.

“Although we did make excellent progress, we still do need a little bit more time to progress towards the finish line,” UN oceans ambassador Rena Lee said, according to Agence France-Presse.

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Al Jazeera

August 27, 2022
Two weeks of negotiations to finally agree a treaty to protect biodiversity in the high seas, have ended in failure.

The latest talks among United Nations member states came to an end on Friday with negotiators unable to thrash out a legally binding text to address the multitude of issues facing international waters – a zone that encompasses almost half the planet.

Formal and informal discussions have been continuing for some 15 years.

“Although we did make excellent progress, we still do need a little bit more time to progress towards the finish line,” AFP reported conference chair and UN oceans ambassador Rena Lee as saying.

It will now be up to the UN General Assembly to resume a fifth session of formal talks at a date still to be determined.

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Eco-Business

August 12, 2022
Biodiversity encompasses the full variety of life – all genes, species and ecosystems – and it is in danger. That means we are too. As this article explains, a major conference in December 2022 could have a big impact on our collective fate by helping to end biodiversity loss and restore nature.

COP15 is shorthand for the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). In fact, COP15 includes meetings of parties to three international agreements: the CBD and its two subsidiary protocols, namely the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety and the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit-sharing.

The CBD was agreed at the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992. It has three objectives: the conservation of biodiversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair sharing of benefits arising from the use of genetic resources. Some 195 countries and the European Union are now parties to the CBD. The United States is the only member state of the United Nations that has not ratified the agreement. The CBD’s Cartagena Protocol has 173 parties and its Nagoya Protocol has 137.

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Fast Company

August 8, 2022
Navigating the investment landscape is increasingly complex. Supply chain issues, soaring inflation, rising energy prices, spiraling cost of raw materials—the list goes on.

Increasingly, “alarming” levels of global biodiversity loss—or, in investment-speak, the permanent destruction of natural capital—must also be taken into account. In fact, the situation has reached a crisis point where investors are now recognizing the direct line of risk between their portfolios and the natural resources they depend on.

All is not lost. As investors finally start to quantify the risk of global biodiversity loss in terms of dollars, it could spark the level of change that has been so urgently needed for so long. Indeed, investment is now being billed as a key area of debate at the upcoming UN COP-15 summit on biodiversity.

Alongside the significant economic opportunity there is of course also a climate imperative on financial companies to halt the ecological destruction of the Earth. Thankfully, these companies are starting to take notice and establish roots in the movement to reverse biodiversity loss.

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UNDP

August 4, 2022
Reiyia is among leaders fighting for the rights of Indigenous communities and calling for stronger action, as up to 80 percent of the negotiating text in the 20 action targets of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework draft agreement have remained unresolved, threatening progress at the up-coming COP15 conference. While almost 100 countries support the proposal to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and ocean by 2030 under the framework, with the protection of Indigenous rights a critical element of this initiative, countries failed to agree on fundamental issues.

These prominent issues include how much funding would be committed to conserve biodiversity; or what percentage figures the world should strive to protect, conserve and restore to address the extinction crisis. Experts have called for the recognition of the land, territories and traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs). Additionally, Indigenous advocates and allies are pushing to secure the free, prior and informed consent of IPLCs in conservation policies as key for the framework to succeed.

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World Economic Forum

July 25, 2022
A recent report from The Environment Agency found a quarter of England’s mammals and almost a fifth of UK plants are threatened with extinction. With only an abysmal 50% of biodiversity remaining, the UK today ranks in the bottom ten of all countries globally. The present situation may look grim, but the future is potentially bleaker if we don’t act fast. The UN predicts the colossal extinction of one million species by 2039 - it’s clear we need to take action now to drive the change in the world, and humanity’s very survival, needs.

The absence of an urgent response from global leaders to the crisis has taken the loss of the world’s biodiversity to a crisis point, as it now poses as great a risk to humanity as global warming. Ongoing deprioritisation over more immediate global problems, such as the cost of living crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic has stagnated action and accelerated the loss of biodiversity. The delaying of the world’s foremost biodiversity conference, the COP15 summit, four times is proof of this. But humanity sleepwalking into extinction is a disaster, even if it takes fifteen years, and is worthy of urgent global attention.

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Diálogo China

July 21, 2022
After two years of postponements and a change in format, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP15 biodiversity talks will now take place in Montreal, Canada, this December. There is still much work to do in the coming months, if countries are to secure a new global agreement on protecting biodiversity in the coming decade.

At the recent UN Ocean Conference, which took place in Lisbon earlier this month, China Dialogue Ocean spoke with Elizabeth Mrema, the CBD’s executive secretary, about progress so far, on why the talks were relocated from China to Canada, and what needs to happen in the run-up to the event.

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Campaign For Nature

July 21, 2022
At the Africa Nature Finance Forum, held yesterday on the sidelines of the inaugural African Protected Areas Congress (APAC) 2022, government leaders and experts from across Africa called for an urgent increase in financing to protect the world’s biodiversity.

“By 2100, we may lose half of our bird and animal species, 20-30% of the productivity of African lakes and significant numbers of our plant species,” said Hon. Lee White, Minister of Water, Forests, the Sea, and Environment, Gabon. “In this context, without strong action, we will create instability and security issues all over the African continent. One of the key elements is the mobilization of predictable and sustainable resources. This is why we need to think about innovative and sustainable finance for nature.” 

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China Dialogue

July 19, 2022
On 21 June, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment (MEE) announced that the second phase of COP15 – the 15th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity – would be relocated from the southern Chinese city of Kunming to Montreal, Canada, and held 5–17 December.

The news confirmed rumours that had been circulating for some time, and sparked widespread discussion. I have been working closely on COP15 for three years and was not surprised by the change of venue. But it remains disappointing.

Originally scheduled for October 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic saw the meeting initially postponed to May 2021, and then split into two phases. The first, made up of non-negotiation agenda items, was held last October and most international participants attended virtually. The second phase was due to take place in the first half of this year.

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Eco-Business

July 14, 2022
One in five people rely on wild species for income and food, while one in three rely on wood fuel for cooking, according to a major new report. Its authors aim to demonstrate how the use of wild species is far more prevalent than most people realise and that the decline of nature threatens human lives and livelihoods.

The report follows four years of work by 85 experts in the natural and social sciences and holders of indigenous and local knowledge around the world. They were working under the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a  body set up to advise policymakers on biodiversity.

In 2019, IPBES warned that one million species were at risk of extinction. It found that over-exploitation of wild species was the second-largest driver of this trend for species living on land or freshwater, after land degradation and habitat destruction. For marine species, over-exploitation is the biggest driver.

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Reuters

July 13, 2022
You might have thought that when the pandemic brought tourism to a sudden halt, it would have been good for nature. Some areas overrun by tourists fell quiet, and animals roamed more widely, while trampled flora began to recover. But the impact on species and ecosystems wasn’t all positive.

“What we saw very clearly, when tourism had evaporated, was that people really started to wake up to how important the sector was,” suggests Anna Spenceley, an independent researcher and chair of a specialist working group on protected areas for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

“Conservationists realised: hang on … communities are no longer getting any benefit from (tourism). And now they're going to start hunting whatever we have tried to protect in our conservation area, because they've got no money coming in,” says Spenceley.

Coming out of the pandemic, conservation groups, governments and some tour operators are trying to promote a more sustainable approach to tourism, reframing relationships with nature to encourage biodiversity rather than degrade it.

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Enviro360

July 9, 2022
Conservation organizations have cautioned that talks on a worldwide pact to safeguard nature this decade run the risk of failing to reach a consensus unless political leaders step up.

The fourth round of talks to establish a global framework to stop the devastation of the earth’s ecosystems came to a close on Sunday in Nairobi, Kenya, with essentially no progress made.

The Campaign for Nature’s director, Brian O’Donnell, told Climate Home News that the situation was “dark.” Instead of uniting on goals, negotiators turned to argue over details. The most significant difficulties have not changed noticeably.

This was the final scheduled conference before negotiators gather at Cop15 in Montreal, Canada, from December 5–17, to finalize the deal that has been dubbed the “Paris Agreement for nature.”

The biodiversity treaty, though, hardly registers on the international agenda four years after the process began as nations struggle with the coronavirus outbreak, Russia’s war on Ukraine, and skyrocketing prices.

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Phys.org

June 27, 2022
Delegates from almost 200 nations have made little progress towards hammering out a blueprint for a global pact to protect nature from human activity, after almost a week of difficult talks in Nairobi.

The meetings wrapping up Sunday were aimed at ironing out differences among the UN Convention on Biological Diversity's (CBD) 196 members, with barely six months before a crucial COP15 summit in December.

The ambitious goal is to draw up a draft text outlining a global framework to "live in harmony with nature" by 2050, with key targets to be met by 2030.

Many hope the landmark deal, when finalised, will be as ambitious in its goals to protect life on Earth as the Paris agreement was for climate change.

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Climate Home News

June 27, 2022
The fourth round of negotiations to agree on an international framework to halt the destruction of the earth’s ecosystems ended in Nairobi, Kenya, on Sunday, with virtually no progress being made.

“It’s a bleak picture,” Brian O’Donnell director of the Campaign for Nature, told Climate Home News. “Negotiators resorted to technical bickering rather than aligning on ambition. There has been no discernible movement on the most important issues.”

The meeting was the last planned before negotiators meet at Cop15 in Montreal, Canada, from 5-17 December, to finalise the agreement which has been widely billed as the “Paris Agreement for nature”.

But four years since the start of the process, the biodiversity pact barely registers on the international agenda, as governments wrangle with the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine and soaring inflation.

Eight conservation groups have urged UN chief António Guterres to convene political leaders to “step in and help get it done” in an open letter. “We must sound the alarm that this process has reached a crisis point,” they wrote.

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Reuters

June 25, 2022
With only two days left to hash out a U.N. draft agreement to protect global biodiversity, organizers on Friday urged delegates in Nairobi to "pick up the pace".

"We cannot afford to spend hours discussing one line of text," Basile van Havre, one of the two co-chairs of the talks, told Reuters.

Negotiations are scheduled to end on Sunday, with the draft agreement to be adopted in December by governments at a key biodiversity summit, known as "COP15".

But "at the current pace as we've seen, it will not be possible to have text [ready] for COP15," said co-chair Francis Ogwal during a plenary on Friday.

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