New Delhi: The world is not on target to protect 30 per cent of its lands and oceans by 2030 because of implementation failures, found the State of Biodiversity Action report released on 15 October.
Ahead of the United Nations Biodiversity COP in Armenia, leaders from 196 countries got together as UN Secretary General António Guterres launched the first State of Biodiversity Action report, to see how the world is faring on its global biodiversity targets.
“Nature won’t thrive on good intentions… fewer than half of the national biodiversity targets are on track,” said Guterres during the press conference.
The UN Biodiversity COP 17, scheduled in Yerevan, Armenia from 19 to 30 October this year, is a meeting held once every two years by all signatories of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Signed in 1992 during the Rio Earth Summit, the CBD is an international treaty aimed at protecting plant, animal and ecosystem diversity through sustained conservation.
In 2022, at the Biodiversity COP15, the participants adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which laid out specific targets: 30 per cent of the world’s land, water and marine resources to be protected by 2030, $200 billion to be raised every year for biological conservation, and halting the extinction of threatened species.
On 15 October, Gueterres released the first State of Biodiversity Action report, 4 years after the Kunming-Montreal Protocol was signed, to understand how the world has fared on achieving these targets.
The report found that there were two main problems with how countries were working towards the Kunming Montreal goals. One, the targets and planned actions set by countries do not fully cover all 23 global targets, and their promises are less ambitious than what the world needs.
While 90 per cent of all countries have set national biodiversity targets, less than 50 per cent of these targets are currently on track.
The second problem therefore is that countries that have set roadmaps and action plans are not acting fast enough to meet the 2030 deadline, especially in certain areas such as addressing biodiversity loss, and marine ecosystems.
Also, there is a major imbalance in the financial committments made towards addressing biological diversity, as opposed to subsidies and incentives for destroying it.
“Today, for every dollar that invests in protecting nature, we’re spending $30 on destroying it. So redirecting subsidies from activities that harm nature and towards those that are nature-positive is essential,” said Ingor Anderson, Executive Director, United Nations Environment Programme, during the report release.
The upcoming Biodiversity COP
The new report also sets out an agenda for the upcoming COP, with Canada already laying out a ‘letter of expectations’. Canada’s list of priorities includes building on the Montreal COP 15, which signed the Kunming-Montreal Framework, and closing the finance gap.
In addition, the assembled leaders plan to identify and redirect subsidies, including those on fertilisers, fuel and infrastructure, which directly harm nature. The 2022 Framework included shifting $500 billion in subsidies away from nature-harming practices in one of its targets.
This COP will also see discussions on getting more money into the Cali Fund, which was set up during the last COP. This fund is intended to share the benefits from the commercial use of digital genetic information from nature, such as genetic data from plants and animals. Governments need to create incentives or rules that encourage companies to contribute money to the fund.
Besides, the signatories will discuss how to incorporate human rights, Indigenous peoples’ rights and traditional knowledge into biodiversity policies.
“The war on nature has not yet ended, and we still live the dramatic combination of the three global crises: the crisis of climate change, the crisis of loss of biodiversity, and the crisis of pollution,” said Guterres during the report launch.
(Edited by: Aakriti Handa)