‘Paris deal’ for nature is key for business too

THE world’s biodiversity crisis is “flashing red”, yet as representatives from nearly every country in the world gather this week in Montreal for the UN COP15 summit to tackle the issue, comprehensive agreement is far from sure.

COP15 is the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, a treaty drafted in 1992 to protect the world’s rich tapestry of biodiversity. The event was originally set to happen in China in 2020, but postponed due to the pandemic. 

The meeting has been moved to Canada to avoid further delay, with China retaining the presidency. The first phase of the convention was held last year with ministers from more than 100 countries pledging to reach agreement on a global biodiversity framework, but falling short of commitment to specific targets.

The goal in Montreal is therefore developing a post-2020 biodiversity framework which will map out a plan for tackling the crisis in the natural world potentially until mid-century for most countries, with the exception of the United States, which has not yet signed up. This will include key targets to be met by 2030.

If this can be agreed, it would hold out hope that the meeting could be as consequential for stemming biodiversity loss as the 2015 Paris agreement still might be for action on climate change. The need is particularly pressing as Montreal comes, tragically, after countries failed to meet a single one of the targets set over the last decade.

Warning lights

The warning lights are therefore flashing red in what has been called by some scientists the sixth great extinction facing the planet with an estimated million plant and animal species now facing the chopping board. Monitored wildlife populations have plummeted by an average of around 70 per cent in the past 50 years, and the equivalent of around 90 hockey rinks worth of forest are being lost every minute. Clearly, this cannot go on.

Today, at least half of global GDP is estimated to be critically dependent on healthy functioning ecosystems. This is either directly (from the use of resources like water, processes like pollination, or conditions like soil health) or via indirect activities – like retail, for instance – that rely on those natural processes.

There are more than 20 targets in the draft agreement created by a UN working group in the years leading up to COP15 to replace a prior agreement from the last major biodiversity summit held in Japan in 2010. Getting through this mammoth task will require painstaking negotiation in Montreal, and only a handful of the targets and around one fifth of the text in the framework has yet been agreed.

As far as sticking points in negotiations, there are three key ones. These are, how ambitious the new plan should be, how it will be financed, and how to ensure progress is measured and reported transparently.

One of the key targets in the draft is a commitment to protecting at least 30 per cent of land and water around the globe by 2030. More than 100 countries have joined a coalition in support of this “30 by 30” goal which would represent a significant increase in land and ocean protected, but is seen by a wide array of NGOs as still too little, too late.

On the issue of reporting, a coalition of more than 330 businesses and financial institutions spanning 52 countries have recently signed a joint “make it mandatory” declaration supporting the treaty’s target on corporate reporting. The target could require governments to lay out plans for firms, beginning with largest businesses in sectors with the most negative impacts, to disclose this and biodiversity dependencies.

One other key issue for business that is “on the table” is potential phasing out of environmentally harmful subsidies. It is estimated that US$1.8 trillion of subsidies – equivalent to about 2 per cent of global GDP – are provided each year by governments to industries that are driving nature loss and climate change.

Nations already committed at COP26 in Glasgow to “phase down and out” all “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies. So nature-harming subsidies may yet be the next step.

While the event is not centred around climate change per se, it will be one of the key issues underlying much of the discussion. For global warming is accelerating loss of biodiversity and key ecosystems, including biodiverse forestry, which may well be a death knell to the 1.5 degree Celsius temperature goal in the Paris treaty.

With the stakes in play so high, one striking feature of the event is that few heads of state and government will be at the event, with a notable exception being Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. This is despite pressure on such world leaders to attend. 

In the United Kingdom, for instance, dozens of MPs, including Conservatives from the ruling party, wrote to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak asking him to attend COP15 and warning that lack of high-level political buy-in could spell failure. Former prime minister Liz Truss had committed to attend. 

To be sure, UK Environment Secretary Thérèse Coffey will be there, but the lesson from successful climate summits like Paris in 2015 is that it often takes the top political players to make the difference between success and failure in what are often exhausting, marathon negotiations. The letter to Sunak, rightly, warns that there is a clear and present danger that Montreal could replicate the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit, where the process nearly collapsed.

As Lord Randall, a former Conservative MP and former prime minister Theresa May’s ex-environment adviser, commented, Sunak “should think about ways in which he can engage with other heads of government whilst the talks are ongoing and ensure that COP15 is a Paris moment for nature. It would be helpful for the UK government to publish ambitious targets to restore nature, as promised in the Environment Act. We hope that the same leadership the United Kingdom has demonstrated on climate will be extended to fight for an ambitious global deal to protect nature at COP15. There is no time to waste”.

 With the Montreal COP underway, the world is therefore at a crossroads. Failure would be a disaster, yet success could still see a powerful new framework for nature that becomes a foundation stone of sustainable development for billions across the world in the 2020s and beyond.

Andrew Hammond is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics