InterPress Service

June 27, 2022
As the last working group meeting of the Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Agenda concluded here on Sunday, the delegates’ job at COP15 Montreal just got tougher as delegates couldn’t finalize the text of the agenda. Texts involving finance, cost and benefit-sharing, and digital sequencing – described by many as ‘most contentious parts of the draft agenda barely made any progress as negotiators failed to reach any consensus.

The week-long 4th meeting of the Working Group of the Biodiversity Convention took place from June 21-26, three months after the 3rd meeting of the group was held in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting, attended by a total of 1634 participants, including 950 country representatives, had the job cut out for them: Read the draft Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and its 21 targets, discuss, and clean up the text – target by target, sentence by sentence, at least up to 80%.

But, on Saturday – a day before the meeting was to wrap up, David Ainsworth – head of Communications at CBD, hinted that the progress was far slower than expected. Ainsworth mentioned that the total cleaning progress made was just about 8%.

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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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The Guardian

June 21, 2022
The date for a key UN nature summit has finally been confirmed after more than two years of delays and amid fears momentum to halt biodiversity loss across the globe has been lost.

Ahead of the latest round of negotiations in Nairobi this week, the UN convention on biological diversity confirmed that the Cop15 biodiversity conference will now take place in Montreal, Canada, from 5 to 17 December, after it became clear China would not be able to host the event in Kunming due to the country’s zero-Covid policy.

It comes after several pandemic-related delays to the meeting, which was meant to take place in October 2020, and amid intense frustration with Beijing, who are holding the presidency for a major UN environmental agreement for the first time.

Fears had been building over the prohibitive cost for smaller countries to participate in Cop15 if it were held in China, along with concerns over restrictions on civil society, Indigenous groups and the press.

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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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