Edie

June 21, 2022
The summit was originally planned for Kunming, China, in 2020. It was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequently split into two parts, with the first part successfully completed in Kunming in October 2021 and the second meeting in Kunming taking place this spring.

The second meeting was unsuccessful, with no final deal agreed. Interim talks in Nairobi were, therefore, added to the UN’s calendar for this summer, and a final meeting for Kunming in autumn. However, China saw a spike in Covid-19 cases in the first quarter of the year and places including Beijing and Shanghai were put into lockdown.

With all of this in mind, concern had been growing that the summit would not conclude this year if its conclusion depended on a face-to-face event in China. This would mean that the post-2020 set of international biodiversity goals would be more than two years delayed in terms of their creation and implementation. The previous set of goals, the Aichi Goals, went unmet, and pressure is mounting on the UN to deliver a strong agreement to prevent Earth’s sixth mass extinction.

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Reuters

June 21, 2022
The United Nations said on Tuesday it would move talks to secure a global post-2020 biodiversity agreement from Kunming in China to Montreal, Canada, following multiple pandemic-related delays.

Delegates to the Dec. 5-17 summit of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, known as COP-15, will aim to adopt a global framework for biodiversity to halt and reverse losses of the world's plants, animals, and ecosystems.

Initially scheduled to take place in the southwestern Chinese city in October 2020, COP15 was delayed due to COVID-19. Though a first round of discussions was held virtually in Kunming in October 2021, the convention's secretariat announced this March that the summit had been delayed for a fourth time as China battled another wave of COVID-19 cases.

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NewScientist

June 20, 2022
A long-delayed UN biodiversity summit will be held in Canada this year rather than China as originally planned, after concerns that the Chinese government would postpone it until 2023 due to covid-19.

The COP15 meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) aims to bring together the world’s governments to agree a new deal on halting the loss of animals, plants and habitats globally by 2030.

However, the conference has been repeatedly delayed from its original date of October 2020 due to the covid-19 pandemic, despite other major environment summits taking place. Now, a decision has been taken by the COP bureau to relocate the meeting from Kunming, China, to Montreal, Canada, on 5 to 17 December, three sources have told New Scientist. An official announcement by the CBD is expected imminently today.

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BirdLife International

June 20, 2022
From tomorrow (21-26 June), negotiators from around the world will convene in Nairobi, Kenya to work through the latest draft of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework – a global plan to protect and restore biodiversity as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The final framework is expected to be adopted by the world’s governments at the upcoming UN biodiversity conference, COP15 (Conference of Parties), later this year. This meeting follows the Geneva meeting in March, which was criticised for its slow progress.

Despite uncertainty around the timing of COP15, the urgency to tackle the biodiversity crisis is ever present. We cannot afford any further delays in moving towards the completion of the global biodiversity framework and adoption at COP.

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Yahoo! Sports

June 20, 2022
The annual global summit on biodiversity, COP15, has been delayed by two months to December and will now be hosted in Canada rather than China, according to environmental charities.

This follows concerns the Chinese government would postpone the event for a fourth time into 2023 because of Covid-19 - the conference was originally due to be held in 2020.

The summit will provide governments a chance to come up with a long-term plan to reverse the threat to life on Earth - nearly a third of all species are currently endangered due to human activities.

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Princeton School of Public and International Affairs

June 13, 2022
Protecting land and water is essential to preserving habitats for wildlife and mitigating harmful climate change effects. This is why many countries — as well as the U.S. federal government and state of California, have pledged to protect 30% of all land and water by 2030, also known as the “30x30” initiative.

Achieving this target at the global level will require most countries to rapidly expand their protected area network. A team of researchers at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the National University of Singapore investigated how reaching this ambitious target will benefit conservation and reduce climate change effects.

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NewScientist

June 10, 2022

It's time for China to put national pride aside and let another country host the UN COP15 biodiversity conference, for the sake of wildlife, plants and habitats worldwide, says Adam Vaughan.

Imagine that for more than two years the world had decided not to bother setting a future target on action to avert climate change. That governments had accepted a status quo where one country repeatedly postponed a landmark UN climate summit despite other major meetings happening amid the lingering covid-19 pandemic. There would be outrage. Leaders would line up to condemn the limbo. Thousands of people would protest in the streets over inaction on such an existential issue.

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Phys.org

June 8, 2022
Traditional Owners in Australia are the creators of millennia worth of traditional ecological knowledge—an understanding of how to live amid changing environmental conditions. Seasonal calendars are one of the forms of this knowledge best known by non-Indigenous Australians. But as the climate changes, these calendars are being disrupted.

How? Take the example of wattle trees that flower at a specific time of year. That previously indicated the start of the fishing season for particular species. Climate change is causing these plants to flower later. In response, Traditional Owners on Yuku Baja Muliku (YBM) Country near Cooktown are having to adapt their calendars and make new links.

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ABC News

June 1, 2022
Ramping up the protection of land within the next decade could make a significant dent in biodiversity and climate change efforts that would get countries closer to their conservation goals, according to new research.

If countries succeed in protecting 30% of global land area by 2030, it could benefit about 1,000 vertebrate species whose habitats currently lack any form of protection, according to a study published Wednesday in Science Advances.

About half of the species that would benefit from expanding protected areas worldwide are classified as critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable or near-threatened, the scientists said.

What is being dubbed by scientists as the "30 by 30" target could also spare about 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year in avoided carbon emissions or carbon sequestration, the paper states.

Researchers from Princeton University and the National University of Singapore compared models that maximize different aspects of conservation. They considered only natural areas and excluding croplands and urban areas, and found that additional benefits could result for biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation and nutrient-regulation if protected area coverage were increased to 30% of the terrestrial area within 238 countries worldwide.

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Business Green

June 1, 2022
The UK government is set to pledge £330m to help developing countries tackle environmental breakdown, conserve nature and deliver on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) on the first day of a major UN environmental summit kicking off tomorrow in Stockholm.

The Stockholm+50 conference has been organised to mark 50 years since the historic United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972, and is expected to see rafts of global politicians, CEOs and civil society leaders in attendance, alongside the launch of a number of fresh environmental commitments.

The £330m set to be officially announced by the UK government tomorrow is earmarked for the Global Environment Facility (GEF), the UN mechanism financing designed to help developing countries meet global nature commitments, in a move aimed at driving finance towards a "nature positive future".

International Environment Minister Lord Zac Goldsmith said scaling finance for nature protection was an economic imperative that would require governments and private actors to pool resources.

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UK.Gov

June 1, 2022
Action to drive the recovery of the global economy and bolster food security worldwide by protecting and restoring nature will be set out today by government ministers, CEOs and civil society leaders at a major multinational summit being held today (Wednesday 1 June).

‘Financing the Transition to a Nature Positive Future’ will be held in association with Stockholm +50, a major environmental meeting led by the United Nations between 2-3 June. The event is being convened by the UK Government and supported by the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature (LPN).

Over half of GDP - $44 trillion - relies on the services that nature provides or natural capital - from the bees that pollinate the plants we eat, to the trees that purify our air and the forests and oceans that absorb carbon emissions. However, we are spending our natural capital much faster than it is being replenished.

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China Daily

May 27, 2022
Humanity has only one home - the Earth. But it isn't ours exclusively. We share our beautiful planet - this stunning blue marble - with millions of other species, and our existence is intertwined with theirs. For the sake of all living things, we must ensure a healthy and thriving planet.

This simple yet important truth is reflected in this year's International Day for Biological Diversity theme: "building a shared future for all life". This theme could not be more compelling, because currently we are failing our Mother Earth.

The planet is at a breaking point. With 75 percent of the Earth's land, and two-thirds of its oceans, now affected by humans, environmental disruption is escalating at an unprecedented rate. An estimated 150 to 200 species are going extinct each day, and one-fifth of all nations could see ecosystems collapse due to destruction of wildlife habitats. In addition, carbon emissions are higher than ever.

If the world is to sustain future generations, we must fundamentally fix our broken relationship with nature.

To this end, at part one of the COP15 summit of the Convention on Biological Diversity, we saw some important steps being made. The international community came together to sign the Kunming Declaration, agreeing to integrated actions for the protection of biodiversity around the world. China also announced the establishment of the 1.5 billion yuan ($223 million) Kunming Biodiversity Fund to support conservation efforts in developing countries, and the United Nations Development Programme and UN Environment Programme look forward to offering support in its operation.

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Nature

May 20, 2022
Researchers are increasingly concerned that the world is running two years behind schedule to finalize a new global framework on biodiversity conservation. They say the delay to the agreement, which aims to halt the alarming rate of species extinctions and protect vulnerable ecosystems, has consequences for countries’ abilities to meet ambitious targets to protect biodiversity over the next decade.

Representatives from almost 200 member states of the United Nations’ Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) were set to meet in Kunming, China, in October 2020, to finalize a draft agreement. It includes 21 conservation targets, such as protecting 30% of the world’s land and seas. But the meeting, called the 15th Conference of the Parties, was cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been postponed several times since.

The conference is tentatively rescheduled for late August or early September, but China — which as the conference president is also the host — hasn’t confirmed the date. And now the country’s strict COVID-19 lockdown in Shanghai and rising cases of the virus in Beijing have put that meeting in doubt, too.

Researchers say the delay in finalizing the agreement is stalling conservation work, especially in countries that rely on funds committed by wealthier nations to achieve the targets. The almost two-year hold-up means that countries will have less time to meet the agreement’s 2030 deadline. “We now have eight years to do more, whilst many countries are facing a recession and trying to prioritize economic recovery,” says Alice Hughes, a conservation biologist at the University of Hong Kong. “The longer we wait, the more diversity is lost.”

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The Statesman

May 18, 2022
While science shows that the crisis facing the natural world is accelerating, the UN process for addressing global biodiversity loss is at serious risk of further slowing down.

Initially scheduled for October 2020, the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has already been delayed four times because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

With no official date announced for COP15, there is growing concern among scientists and other experts that countries are failing to address the biodiversity crisis with the required leadership and commitment.

Some 196 countries are working through the CBD to develop a global strategy to help stem the tide of catastrophic biodiversity loss, which threatens up to one million species with extinction within decades.

Countries have touted COP15 as an opportunity to deliver a deal for nature similar in ambition and significance to the Paris Climate Agreement, but repeated delays and a lack of urgency or high-level political attention could undermine that outcome if not addressed immediately.

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Reuters

May 17, 2022
We need tree-planting, we need renewables, and we need fossil-free fuels. But in our efforts to tackle the climate emergency, are we forgetting the soil beneath our feet?

Many organisations are warning that the overlapping crises of climate, biodiversity and land degradation must be tackled together – not sequentially – if planet Earth is to continue to support us.

The Global Land Outlook report published last month by the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), describes land as the “operative link between biodiversity loss and climate change”.

Underlining that, parties to the Convention meeting in Cote d’Ivoire from May 9-20 for the first of the year’s three big UN summits, heard French President Emmanuel Macron in a video message call for all public policies to incorporate the three interlinked conventions on biodiversity, climate change, and desertification, that grew out of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.

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