It’s Already Been a Grim Month for the Planet

A critical United Nations summit to preserve the future of life on Earth ended in disarray earlier this month, after two weeks of exhausting negotiations. The meeting in Cali, Colombia, was intended to be a milestone in global efforts to slow and ultimately reverse the dramatic, human-caused destruction of species and ecosystems worldwide. Despite some important breakthroughs, the event fell far short of the organizers’ aspirations, deferring critical issues and raising grave doubts about the international community’s commitment to end what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres describes as humanity’s “suicidal war against nature.” The outcome of the U.S. presidential election, whose victor describes climate change as a “hoax,” only reinforces pessimism about the fate of the living planet.

The Road to COP16

Like many other global initiatives, this event involved an alphabet soup of frameworks, agreements, and parties. This sixteenth conference of parties (COP16) stands in the shadow of its more famous sibling COP, despite attracting 23,000 delegates across governments, academia, and civil society. Though also deeply tied to climate, this biennial COP gathers the 196 parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). (The sibling, this year called COP29, kicked off this week in Baku, Azerbaijan, with the leaders of the world’s major polluters opting not to attend.)

In 2010, CBD parties agreed to a set of twenty objectives, known as the Aichi targets (for the Japanese prefecture where the negotiations occurred). In the ensuing years, not a single target was achieved—a record of futility notable even in the voluminous annals of global environmental failure. Instead of slowing down, the destruction of nature has proceeded apace.

But in 2022, the CBD parties agreed to the historic Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), a comprehensive blueprint with twenty-three targets often called the “Paris Agreement for nature.” Its most eye-catching provision is the so-called 30x30 commitment—a pledge by signatories to permanently protect 30 percent of their terrestrial and marine environments by 2030. Other targets range from restoring degraded ecosystems to enhancing sustainability in agriculture, fisheries, and forestry.

The mandate of the Cali conference—framed as Peace With Nature—was to assess global progress and accelerate action on the GBF. Instead, it exposed the yawning gap between rhetoric and action in confronting the planet’s deepening ecological emergency. The lack of attention it receives is also notable, passing virtually unnoticed by global publics. This is especially true in the United States, the sole UN member state that is not party to the treaty. COP16 was no exception, causing barely a ripple in the U.S. media.

The Stakes

That heedlessness is a tragedy, because the collapse of global biodiversity poses a grave threat to human flourishing and even survival. Addressing this emergency requires a new mindset that recognizes that humans do not exist apart from nature but are integrally embedded in it—and that “nature-based solutions” play an integral role on combating climate change.

The devastation has been staggering. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, the average size of monitored wildlife populations has plunged 73 percent worldwide in the past fifty years. Insect populations have declined by 45 percent. A quarter of the world’s mangroves have been lost over the same period, and half of what remains are at are risk of collapse. Half of all shallow water coral is gone, and the rest are on track to disappear by 2100. Current extinction rates are 100 to 1,000 times above the average natural levels, and a quarter of all species may be vulnerable. The five main drivers of biodiversity loss—changes in land and sea use, unsustainable exploitation of species, climate change, pollution, and invasive species—are all anthropogenic.

Humanity’s wanton destruction of nature is a grievous, self-inflicted wound that endangers the countless benefits people obtain from healthy species and ecosystems. The World Economic Forum estimates that half of global GDP is “moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services.” And although firms, governments, communities, and individuals readily invest in human, physical, and financial capital, they take this “natural capital” for granted, tolerating its depreciation and treating its destruction as a side effect of market activity. Meanwhile, Earth’s life support systems continue to erode.

Sure, economists now study the economics of biodiversity, governments are adopting natural capital accounting, and firms are increasingly concerned by their exposure to nature loss. But these shifts toward responsible ecological stewardship are happening slowly, and the financial resources available to conserve biodiversity are nowhere near what is required. According to the Paulson Institute, the world faces a biodiversity financing gap of between $598 billion and $824 billion per year. Meanwhile, governments currently spend more than $7 trillion annually on nature-destroying direct and indirect subsidies for agriculture, fisheries, fossil fuels, and other sectors.

The political impediments to collective responses are daunting. The international political system is divided into nearly 200 sovereign territorial units, but carbon cycles and migratory species obey no such boundaries. Many critical biomes and ecosystems, such as the Amazon or Congo Basins, are located within the jurisdictions of a handful of countries that tend to resist outside interference. To make matters worse, no overarching global environmental organization is charged with protecting the natural world. What exists instead is a fragmented collage of underpowered and under-resourced multilateral organizations and treaties, including the CBD. These ungainly frameworks are negotiated, implemented, and monitored by environmental ministries, which have far weaker bureaucratic positions than foreign, defense, and finance ministries. And the defense of biodiversity often faces fierce domestic opposition from leaders and citizens who regard public investments in conservation, both at home and abroad, as a costly distraction. 

A Glimmer of Hope

Despite these hurdles, a few vanguard governments and the mobilization of global civil society have kept pushing the agenda forward. In 2020, Costa Rica and France launched a coalition that embraced the 30x30 goal popularized by scientists and advocates. By January 2021, more than fifty countries had joined this program of action, and the historic GBF agreement, with the 30x30 agreement as its centerpiece, was finalized in December 2022, after exhaustive negotiations. At a moment of deep pessimism about multilateralism, the GBF provided a rare success story.

The purpose of the Cali meeting was to take stock of the progress since 2022 and generate new momentum, and the location was no accident. Colombia is the second most-biodiverse country on the planet after Brazil, and its six-decade experience with civil war makes it intimately familiar with the connections between environmental degradation, natural resource competition, and peace. Its president, Gustavo Petro, is an outspoken critic of the environmental destruction wrought by rapacious capitalism. Following his election in late 2022, Petro moved to end Colombia’s reliance on fossil fuels, canceling oil drilling leases in the country. “We are beginning the era of human extinction,” Petro warned delegates at COP16. Their mission was to alter humanity’s course.

Assessing the Outcome

The results fell well short of expectations, but the conferees did chalk up a couple of important wins:

An historic victory for indigenous peoples. Although indigenous peoples constitute only 6 percent of the world’s population, they serve as custodians of more than a third of its most important areas for biodiversity and are priceless repositories of traditional knowledge of its effective management and stewardship. At Cali, indigenous activists secured a rare and welcome triumph: official acknowledgement that indigenous groups and local communities should be granted a formal decision-making role, in the form of a new permanent subsidiary body to the CBD. Indigenous delegations, well-represented at COP16, reacted with tears of jubilation.

A breakthrough agreement on benefits from sharing genetic resources. The CBD and its associated Nagoya Protocol (2010) contain important clauses governing access to and benefit sharing from genetic resources, but governments have wrangled over how to govern digital sequence information (DSI) obtained from the genes of living organisms. This has been an especially sore spot in the Global South, where the majority of the world’s biodiversity is located. Developing nations are frequent victims of “biopiracy,” whereby rich-country corporations (including pharmaceutical, cosmetics, and agribusiness companies) obtain genetic resources from their territories and monetize these, without any authorization or compensation. The market for DSI, already in the billions of dollars, is poised to explode thanks to the AI revolution. Under the agreement reached at Cali, corporations with more than $20 million in assets, $5 million in profits, and $50 million in sales, are supposed to contribute 1 percent of profits or 0.1 percent of revenue to a new DSI fund for the benefit of developing countries, with at least 50 percent of the money going to indigenous communities.

In other areas, COP16 fell shy of expectations:

Weak national plans and no monitoring provisions. Parties were supposed to arrive in Cali with detailed national biodiversity strategies and action plans that explain how they would fulfill the GBF’s twenty-three targets. On the eve of the conference, 85 percent had failed to do so, including twelve of seventeen “megadiverse” countries. Although a dozen-odd countries submitted their plans during COP16 itself, the poor compliance seems like a bad omen. COP16 was also supposed to create a robust framework for monitoring progress in implementing the GBF, including a voluntary system of peer review, to avoid repeating the failure of the Aichi goals. Unfortunately, the conferees ran out of time before reaching consensus on a draft monitoring framework.

Paltry biodiversity funding. COP16’s biggest disappointment was the failure to deliver on financial commitments—or even an agreed strategy for raising needed funds. As part of the GBF, countries agreed to mobilize $200 billion annually for conservation from public and private sources by 2030, with wealthy nations contributing $20 billion of this by 2025 and $30 billion by 2030. (As of 2022, developed countries devoted only $3.8 billion annually to biodiversity-specific finance). At Cali, rich nations gave no indication they were prepared to meet this goal, pledging only $163 million more to a modest GBF Fund. Developing countries and activists responded with outrage, noting that the world had proved willing to mobilize trillions during the pandemic and criticizing wealthy governments for assuming that private-sector financing, as well as markets for biodiversity credits, would somehow magically fill the void.

Developing countries also pressed to establish a new dedicated fund for nature under the governance of the CBD COP, arguing that the current setup is inadequate. Wealthy countries, including the members of the European Union, Japan, and Australia, blocked these efforts, and the conference expired before a final decision could be taken.

The parties also made no progress on their 2022 commitment to eliminate $500 billion a year in nature-destroying subsidies—a step that could free up budgets for greater spending on conservation. Most absurdly, the conference ended before the parties even had time to approve the CBD budget for the next two years.

In part, the disappointing outcome reflected unfortunate logistics. As negotiations dragged past their November 1 deadline, many developing country delegations were forced to catch flights home, leaving the conference without a quorum. But other failures reflected entrenched differences and weak political commitment. COP16 parties have agreed to take up the issues of a potential new CBD fund, as well as a monitoring framework, at a special session in 2025.

Among the main oddities in Cali, particularly for an American observer, was the near-total irrelevance of the United States. The continued U.S. inability to ratify the CBD, due to specious concerns about intellectual property rights, sovereignty over natural resources, and onerous financial commitments, is both embarrassing and counterproductive. As a nonparty to the treaty, the United States can participate only as an observer. Lacking a seat at the table, it cannot formally push for its preferred language or object to decisions. It reduces the United States, which ought to be a leader in the protection of life on Earth, to a mere bit player in the face of a planetary ecological emergency. The election of Donald Trump as president will only confirm that status.