COP15 in Montreal: Can we hit a ‘Paris moment’ as world leaders talk biodiversity?

As a once-in-a-decade United Nations nature summit kicked off in Montreal, leaders said they’re hoping for a “Paris moment” — and warned of dire consequences it isn’t achieved.

Tuesday marked the opening ceremonies of the two-week COP15 talks, at which delegates from 196 countries will negotiate a set of goals to stop the steep decline of biodiversity: the planet’s natural places and the web of life they sustain. Canada is part of a “high ambition” coalition pressing for a target of protecting 30 per cent of lands and oceans by 2030.

Cementing ambitious goals would elevate the Montreal meeting to the same level of historic importance as the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, participants say — but the consequences of failing to do so would be even more profound.

“We are treating nature like a toilet,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said Tuesday at the conference’s official opening.

“And ultimately, we are committing suicide by proxy. Because the loss of nature and biodiversity comes with a steep human cost.”

Guterres’ comments followed remarks by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in which he pledged a further $350 million for supporting international biodiversity — but only after those remarks were interrupted by protests.

A group of Indigenous youth stopped Trudeau’s remarks for more than three minutes, drumming, singing, and chanting what sounded like “Trudeau is a colonizer,” according to a video posted to Twitter by Greenpeace Canada.

After he resumed, the prime minister heralded the progress Canada had made in its protected areas, saying that “we’re doing all this work in partnership with Indigenous peoples.” Observers have said that Indigenous-led conservation will be a major theme at the conference; Indigenous lands make up 20 per cent of the planet’s total, but contain 80 per cent of its biodiversity, according to reports.

Trudeau also noted that Canada was among the world’s five biggest countries geographically; together they hold half of the world’s forests. None of these five countries have yet protected 30 per cent of their territory, he added.

“We don’t all have to get there by tomorrow. But by 2030, we really do,” Trudeau said.

Earlier in the day, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change tied the goals the country is pushing for to the outcome of the Paris Agreement, in which countries agreed in 2015 to drastically curtail emissions in order to limit climate change to an ideal of 1.5 degrees.

“One might argue, and I guess I am, that our 1.5 (degrees) is 30 by 30 — protecting 30 per cent of lands and oceans by 2030,” said Steven Guilbeault.

The climate-change treaty and the biodiversity agreement are directly tied to each other, others noted. The acceleration of global warming puts wilderness at even sharper risk: a landmark 2019 report found that up to a million species are at risk of extinction, in part because of climate change. Meanwhile, the protection of natural places, especially forests, acts as a massive buffer against the worst effects of warming.

Even as leaders and delegates expressed high hopes, participants close to the talks warned that the current draft text of the agreement was a mess of tentative clauses, and that a successful outcome would not be possible without “supercharging” negotiations. (None of the last set of goals, set in 2010, were met globally.)

The draft agreement is “far from workable and does not really instill confidence that countries will grab this once-in-a-decade opportunity,” Bernadette Fischler Hooper, the World Wildlife Fund U.K.’s head of international advocacy, said at a midday press conference. Those concerns were echoed earlier by the UN’s own executive secretary for the Convention on Biological Diversity, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema.

“Some progress has been made, but not so much as needed or expected. And I have to personally admit that I don’t feel the delegates went as far as we had expected,” she said.

Still, negotiations don’t formally start until Wednesday. Mrema and others said they were still hoping for an ambitious outcome.

COP15 is “not a normal biodiversity conference,” Mrema said.

“The scientists have outlined to us that this is our last chance to act … that’s the back drop of why we’re here.”

SHARE: