World Biodiversity Summit: Last chance to stop ecosystem collapse?
World Biodiversity Summit: Last chance to stop ecosystem collapse?- From December 7 to 19, the fifteenth COP of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will be held in Montreal, Canada, in which the 2030 Global Biodiversity Strategy must be approved.
- On October 24, the EU Environment Council approved a lukewarm position on the Montreal COP, which incomprehensibly leaves the doors open to organisms with gene drives.
- Environmental and social groups that follow the CBD warn that, both in Europe and globally, truly binding commitments are being delayed, which may be causing points of no return to be surpassed with respect to the integrity of ecosystems and conservation. of the species.
- Ecologists in Action warns that inaction or negative actions by governments and economic agents accelerate the loss of biodiversity and this will lead to greater economic, social and environmental crises, with millions of people seriously harmed.
“It is, surely, the last opportunity to stop the loss of biodiversity.” This is how Ecologists in Action has defined the transcendent CBD meeting next December in Montreal. The Fifteenth Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity will meet, analogous to that on climate change and which deals with humanity's other great environmental challenge, the loss of biodiversity , which, equally or more than the climate crisis, threatens the quality of life of all living beings on Earth and, ultimately, human survival.
Delays and interference at the COP
COP15 should have been held in 2020, but due to COVID-19 it has been postponed up to three times. During this period, different formal and informal work sessions have been held in which social organizations have provided light and stenographers. During these three years, in addition, the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES, analogous to the IPCC on climate change) has continued to collect the scientific information available worldwide, to issue forceful reports that corroborate the warnings launched by environmentalism long ago. more than 50 years. Thus, the degradation of ecosystems, the risk of zoonotic diseases (such as COVID-19 itself) or the overexploitation of natural resources are actions caused by a production and consumption model whose effect is well documented: they erode the possibilities of a life worthy for all people, in all countries of the world.
Among the most important points being negotiated ahead of the summit is the so-called “Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework”, that is, the World Biodiversity Strategy with the perspective of 2030. This document should be approved in Montreal, and should be a binding agreement with as much political significance as the Paris Agreement adopted during the COP on climate change in 2015.
The social organizations participating as observers in the convention process, many of them grouped in the CBD Alliance, have warned that the negotiations of this post-2020 global framework have been seriously interfered with by global economic powers. In some cases by introducing a greater weight of the economic sector in the development of the CBD, and in other cases through its lobbying role with government representatives, which would have resulted in drafts with few obligations and more recommendations within the Framework. Global.
Another extremely worrying aspect for Ecologistas en Acción is that ultra-liberal market mechanisms have been placed on the political agenda to “compensate” the impacts on biodiversity from one place to another. That is, multinational corporations may not have to correct industrial practices that destroy ecosystems, simply paying for restoration actions of other previously degraded ecosystems.
The position of the EU
On October 24, the European Environment Council approved its conclusions, which will serve as the EU's general negotiating mandate for the Montreal COP. Among the agreed commitments are “effectively conserving at least 30% of the world's land and at least 30% of the oceans and restoring 3 billion hectares of degraded terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems and 3 billion hectares of ocean ecosystems.” Ecologistas en Acción highlights that, although these figures are among the most ambitious objectives within the negotiation of the parties, establishing goals focusing on the extension of protected or restored areas instead of measures to achieve the success of these objectives will lead to disappointing results, as has happened in the past.
The Council has also underlined the critical importance of integrating biodiversity into all policies and sectors, committing to lead by example by fully integrating biodiversity into plans and policies at community, national and local level. Ecologistas en Acción criticizes the hypocrisy of this statement, when the European Union has demonstrated its inability to establish this premise, having failed to align to date the commitments of the European Biodiversity Strategy with those of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). The environmental organization demands that biodiversity conservation be a transversal axis of all sectoral policies in an effective way, and not as a mere declaration of intentions.
As part of the Montreal COP15 program, the Tenth Meeting of the Parties (COP-MOP 10) will take place within the framework of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. The Council has spoken out to request the adoption of the Implementation Plan of the Cartagena Protocol. During COP-MOP 10, the desirability of developing guidance for the risk assessment of gene drive organisms (GGOs) will be considered. Environmentalists in Action calls for the EU to advocate for a global moratorium on any release of IGOs into the environment, in response to evidence that they may pose risks to human health and the environment.
All these aspects, and dozens of other elements under negotiation, are being analyzed by the organizations to try to achieve a Global Framework that is truly coherent with the moment of greatest global concern about environmental degradation, which is multiplying with the climate emergency. Ecologistas en Acción, which participates in these alliances, demands greater ambition, determination and urgency when it comes to addressing the causes of this ecological crisis, and that the conservation of biodiversity, and with it the survival of life on the planet, be an effective guarantee once and for all.
