Countries at COP15 agree to ‘transformational’ deal to protect third of the planet by 2030

A “transformational” global deal to save nature was inked into reality in Montreal early Monday morning, one whose most ambitious goal — a promise to protect a third of the planet in the next eight years — was brokered by Canada after a marathon negotiation.

Experts say the deal isn’t perfect, and warned that even more work remains to hold governments accountable in implementing it. But they called core parts of the text “historic,” including a critical target that federal environment Minister Steven Guilbeault was tapped to stickhandle after talks almost fell apart last week.

That target commits nations to protecting 30 per cent of the world’s lands, inland waters and oceans by 2030, and recognizes the central role that Indigenous leadership will play in achieving it.

“On the ‘30 by 30’ target, that is really I think one of the most historic components of this framework. There has never been a conservation goal globally at that scale,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature.

“This puts us within the within a chance of safeguarding biodiversity from collapse.”

At the same time, O’Donnell added, “we’ve never seen such a historic commitment to Indigenous leadership and rights in a conservation agreement. So those two components alone are history-making.”

The agreement was the outcome of two weeks of grinding talks at COP15, the UN nature summit that began in early December. Delegations from 196 countries converged on the Montreal Convention Centre to hammer out a raft of goals, plans and resources to reverse the rapidly accelerating loss of Earth’s biodiversity.

This ecological catastrophe is as profound, and is intimately connected to, the climate change crisis. A million species are at risk of extinction. The well-being of most others are threatened, including humans: our food, water, and air are all dependent on healthy ecosystems.

Scientists, civil society groups, and even businesses had all demanded an ambitious agreement commensurate with the scale of the crisis, especially since the negotiations were already two years into overtime. The conference was initially scheduled for late 2020 in Kunming, China, but postponed multiple times because of the pandemic. China’s zero-COVID policy also prompted the last-minute change to Montreal.

A previous agreement adopted 12 years ago in Japan was also graded as a failure, raising the stakes even further. None of its 20 targets were achieved during a decade when the biodiversity crisis only accelerated. Policymakers and experts blamed this failure on the lack of concrete goals and implementation mechanisms in the deal, and vowed not to make the same mistakes this time.

On that front, the new agreement — known officially as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework — contains text that experts described as a massive improvement over the last deal and other parts they worried could undermine its achievements.

The framework states as its mission to “halt and reverse” biodiversity loss by 2030, a clear time frame and language missing from the previous agreement. In addition to protecting 30 per cent of the planet by then, it also aims to ensure that 30 per cent of degraded areas are restored — though experts questioned the lack of a clear baseline to measure restoration progress.

Canada belongs to a so-called “high ambition coalition” that had pushed for the “30 by 30” target. When talks were almost derailed last week over objections from developing countries over who would pay for all this conservation — most of the world’s remaining intact biodiversity exists in the Global South — Environment Minister Guilbeault was tapped, along with minister Yasmine Fouad of Egypt, to “co-facilitate” consultations on conflicts over the framework, including the 30 by 30 target.

“We’ve done everything in our power to find collaboration, compromise and consensus,” Guilbeault said in a statement.

The deal also uses the word “Indigenous” 20 times, including explicitly recognizing Indigenous Peoples rights over their lands, territories and resources.

The ambitious conservation goal was also met with new commitments to pay for it: a target of mobilizing $200 billion (US) per year from both public and private sources, and a pledge that wealthy countries will raise their funding to developing countries to $30 billion by 2030, a tripling of existing commitments. While that money was less than what some were asking for, it was ultimately seen as acceptable.

The two biggest criticisms of the final deal were the absence of measurable targets for stopping the extinction of species, and the disappearance of the word “mandatory” in a target discussing how businesses should disclose their impacts on nature — strong wording that a coalition of businesses had explicitly asked for.

Kate Allen is a Toronto-based reporter covering climate change for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @katecallen

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