After a two-year delay and re-location from host country China to Montreal, Canada (with Chinese leadership maintained), the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biodiversity (COP15) came to a conclusion in the early hours of Monday 19th December.
The two-week long event culminated in an agreement which sets four long-term goals (for 2050) and 23 short-term targets (for 2030), which 196 countries have now committed to reaching. While the agreement is not legally binding, parties to the convention are required to show their progress on meeting the targets, in a similar fashion to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of the Paris climate agreement.
Aims of COP15: Biodiversity protection and restoration
At a high level, the agreement is aimed at stopping the human-induced destruction of nature and restoring what has already been lost or degraded. The goals and targets will shape the agenda of biodiversity protection and restoration for governments, NGOs and businesses alike, and they will inform legislation, and influence investor and customer expectations.
Key aspects of the agreement include; protecting 30% of the world’s land, water and marine areas by 2030; mobilising $200 billion US per year in domestic and international biodiversity-related funding by 2023, from both public and private sources; reducing subsidies deemed harmful to nature by at least $500 billion by 2030; developed countries providing $20 billion per year by 2025 and $30 billion per year by 2030 in biodiversity-related financial resources to developing countries; restoring 30% of degraded ecosystems; cutting global food waste in half; halting human-induced species extinction; and reducing the introduction of invasive alien species by 50%.
Relevance to business community
As Henri Bruxelles, Executive Vice President of Danone, said on Biodiversity Day at COP27, ‘business has an essential role to play’ to stop and reverse biodiversity loss, and frameworks like COP15 ‘can help unleash the private sector’s potential’. Perhaps most pertinent to the business community in the COP15 agreement is Target 15, which requires signatory governments to ‘take legal, administrative or policy measures to encourage and enable business…[to] regularly monitor, assess, and transparently disclose their risks, dependencies and impacts on biodiversity, including…their operations, supply and value chains and portfolios’. The inclusion of supply and value chain is significant. Businesses should think of this as the biodiversity equivalent of Scope 3 emissions and recognise the increasing expectation that organisations account for those impacts with similar rigour as Scope 1 and 2 emissions.
Target 14 calls for financial flows to be aligned with biodiversity values, thus reinforcing the need for financial institutions to prepare for TNFD reporting. Target 7 pertains to pollution from plastic waste and pesticides and is thus pertinent to businesses in the agriculture and goods manufacturing sectors. Target 10 focuses on sustainable agriculture, aquiculture and forestry, and is pertinent to those associated sectors. Click the link to the COP15 text below to see all the targets, listed on pages 9-12.
Similarly important to recognise for the business community is the amplification of indigenous voices both during the COP negotiations and in the final agreement. Indigenous peoples are mentioned 18 times in the text, reflecting their fundamental role in the protection of biodiversity (indigenous peoples are stewards of nearly 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity, according to a 2008 World Bank Report) and subsequently, the need to value and prioritise indigenous-led conservation models if we are to reach the COP15 targets. Business leaders must factor this into any consideration of biodiversity protection or remediation projects.
So… was COP15 a “success”?
As with all large-scale international negotiations, compromise is the name of the game. The final agreement has been praised by many, and criticised by some as not being ambitious enough, or for not including sufficient funding mechanisms. This was summarily put by Pierre du Plessis, a negotiator from Namibia who told the Associated Press:
‘All the elements are in there for a balance of unhappiness, which is the secret to achieving agreement in UN bodies…Everyone got a bit of what they wanted, not necessarily everything they wanted.’
Similarly, though with more focus on the positives, lead negotiator Steven Guilbeaut, an activist-turned-politician and now Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change said:
‘Many of us wanted more things in the text and more ambition, but we got an ambitious package…. We have an agreement to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, to work on restoration, to reduce the use of pesticides. This is tremendous progress.’
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