We put considerable effort into helping to design and build support for the Paris Agreement, but are nowhere near as engaged or active in a leadership role at the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal
Opinion: Humanity is causing a biodiversity crisis even more dangerous and damaging for us and the planet than the climate crisis we’ve also created. After all, biodiversity is our life-support system. To give nature, and ourselves, a chance we need a pact that’s even more ground-breaking and compelling than the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate.
To that end, the nations of the world are meeting in Montreal until December 19 under the United Nation’s biodiversity convention. It’s the twin of the UN’s climate convention, which recently held its 27th annual meeting in Egypt. They share much in common dating back to their origins at the UN’s first Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992.
They are inextricably linked. The climate and biodiversity crises have common causes - our technologies, consumption patterns and exploitation of nature. And they share many of the same solutions, particularly those that work with nature, not against it.
READ MORE:
* NZ is on climate glide time
* NZ absent on COP27 agriculture day
For example, up to a third of the greenhouse gas emissions humanity emits this decade could be sequestered by nature, says research by the global Nature Based Solutions Initiative based at Oxford University. Moreover, done well those solutions would enhance the resilience and health of nature, which in turn would benefit us.
But while most people understand nature provides our food, many fail to see how vital it is to the global economy. Over half of global GDP, equal to US$41.7 trillion, depends on high-functioning biodiversity and ecosystem services, recent analysis by the insurance company Swiss Re showed.
Yet, one in five countries are at risk of their ecosystems collapsing because of a decline in biodiversity and related beneficial services, it reported.
In Aotearoa, we tell ourselves we’re clean and green … oh, apart from overdoing some things in our built and natural environments. Not so. Our poor score on Swiss Re’s Biodiversity and Ecosystem Service (BES) analysis is far from flash. For example, it’s similar to the US’s and inferior to Japan’s.
If you need a refresher on humanity’s war on nature, try this interactive story from the Guardian, or check out the latest Living Planet report from the WWF. It found that Earth’s wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 69 percent in just under 50 years.
And for a business view, check out Business for Nature. Its 330-plus members, with combined revenues of more than US$1.5t a year, have just called for mandatory reporting by large businesses and financial institutions worldwide on their impacts and dependencies on nature by 2030. They are actively campaigning for that at Montreal’s COP15 meeting.
The Business for Nature signatories include major food companies such as Unilever (which has a €1 billion Climate and Nature Fund), Sainsbury’s, Nestlé, Danone and FrieslandCampina. Of the latter three, the first is Fonterra’s largest customer and the other two are among its competitors.
Moreover, given the importance of nature to our economy, you’d think some New Zealand companies might have joined Business for Nature. But Christchurch International Airport and Lyttelton Port are the only two that have so far.
The signatories to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity have toiled long and hard but so far largely fruitlessly on these issues. Their previous 10-year framework, the Aichi Targets, failed to meet any of its 20 goals in its decade to 2020. It only managed a bit of progress on six.
"Not everyone ‘owned’ the Aichi biodiversity targets," the convention’s executive secretary, Elizabeth Mrema, said in a recent interview with Diálogo Chino, a journalism platform focusing on Latin America-China relations.
"Biodiversity is a cross-cutting issue that can't be dealt with only by governments, and without Indigenous leaders and the private sector. That's a major lesson learnt. Now all stakeholders can see themselves in the draft framework."
The meeting underway in Montreal reflects that significant shift in response to the escalating biodiversity crisis. With more than 10,000 delegates, civil society attendees such as NGOs and businesses outnumber negotiators and politicians for the first time.
The UN’s convention has three objectives: to conserve biological diversity; to use the innumerable components of that diversity sustainably; and to provide fair and equitable access to the benefits generated from using genetic resources.
The convention’s next Global Diversity Framework 2021-2030 is aiming to address all three. The last pre-meeting draft sets out four long-term goals and 22 targets to achieve by 2030, including the headline goals of protecting 30 percent of land and sea globally and halting and reversing nature loss.
“30 x 30” is to biodiversity what 1.5C is to climate. Both are humanity’s utterly critical thresholds. If we achieve them, we have half a chance to cope with the deep damage we’ve already done to both; and perhaps we can even help nature and climate achieve some recovery. If we don’t meet those two thresholds, we only make those two crises far worse.
When the Aichi Targets were established in 2010, 13 percent of the world’s terrestrial areas were protected but very few ocean protections existed. Currently, 15 percent of the world’s land and 7 percent of our oceans are protected. To protect 30 percent of both by 2030, nations would need to double their existing land protections and more than quadruple existing ocean protections.
At first glance, New Zealand seems well placed – at least on the land measure. Almost 30 percent of our land is conserved in the DoC estate and elsewhere.
But within our 12 nautical mile limit, only 7.06 percent of our seas are protected. Beyond that our vast oceanic resource - our 4 million square kilometre Exclusive Economic Zone - is the ninth largest in the world. Yet we give it minimal protection.
New Zealand’s deep sea fishing companies tried to argue in a 2018 paper that 30 percent of that zone was protected. But the two key measures - fishing quotas and a ban on trawling lower than 100m above the seabed - fail the 30 x 30 test of leaving seas and land in “a natural state”.
Some 145 countries have signed up to 30 x 30 under the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People. But New Zealand hasn’t - a lapse that undermines the credibility of our national brand.
Realistically, the chances of the Montreal meeting agreeing to the 30 x 30 goal, one of its four high-level goals, are slim. Of the 22 targets below those in the draft 2030 plan, negotiations on three big ones will be critical to making at least some major progress:
* Target 15 seeks to get some form of reporting by businesses on their impact on nature. But positions among countries are very diverse and strongly held. For example, should reporting be voluntary or mandatory? By what types and size of company? Or should there be any reporting at all?
But even if COP15 fails on this topic, the pressure for reporting on nature is following fast on the heels of increasingly mandatory reporting on climate.
* Target 18 aims to "redirect, repurpose, reform or eliminate incentives harmful to biodiversity, in a just and equitable way, reducing them by at least US$500 billion per year". Such harmful environmental subsidies run to an estimated US$1.8t a year. No doubt, many businesses and governments will fight long and hard any efforts to roll them back.
* Target 19 is one of the most fiercely contested parts of the proposed 2030 framework. It calls for financial resources from all sources to reach US$200b a year to help tackle the global biodiversity crisis. Of which at least US$10b a year would flow from the Global North to the Global South.
In the negotiations already under way, New Zealand is fielding a small team of nine officials led by Rosemary Paterson, manager of MFAT’s Environment Division. Then late next week, Conservation Minister Poto Williams will arrive for the high-level political negotiations which will seek to land a comprehensive agreement.
However, the official NZ delegation is all-government with no civil society representatives, which runs counter to the fast-evolving nature of the biodiversity and climate COPs. However, there are apparently a few NZ civil society delegates attending in other capacities.
Our government says it hopes COP15 will deliver new targets for halting global biodiversity loss. It also supports the 30 x 30 target (even though it is not a member of the High Level Coalition), particularly if it strengthens Indigenous rights and delivers real conservation outcomes.
“We must ensure that our responses to the climate change crisis and the biodiversity crisis are mutually reinforcing, including accelerating nature-based solutions as some of the most effective actions that we can take to halt and reverse biodiversity loss,” it says.
But whereas New Zealand put considerable effort into helping to design and build support for the Paris Agreement, there are no signs it is anywhere near as engaged or active in a leadership role on biodiversity.
That’s a significant failing by New Zealand, at home and on the world stage - given nature is utterly core to our economy, our society, our culture, and our identity.
