AFP, published on Saturday 17 December 2022 at 23:33
Optimism blew at Saturday’s COP15 for biodiversity, where a compromise seemed to be in the offing even if the financial issue crucial to countries in the South remained unresolved.
“I am very confident that we will be able to maintain our ambitions and reach an agreement,” Chinese Environment Minister Huang Runqiu, president of COP15, told reporters on Saturday.
The goal remains to seal by December 19 a deal on biodiversity as historic as that of Paris for the climate in 2015.
“Let’s work together to achieve the most ambitious deal there is. The world needs it,” French President Emmanuel Macron tweeted on Saturday.
“The most vulnerable countries harbor treasures of biological diversity. We need to increase our funding to support them to pack the package,” he added ahead of a call to expand donor circles from the north.
In the absence of leaders at this summit of the decade, which is crucial for humanity and the planet, environment ministers are working hard.
The text is intended as a roadmap for nations to 2030, as the last ten-year plan signed in Japan in 2010 failed to meet any of its goals, particularly due to the lack of monitoring mechanisms.
Key targets still under discussion include proposing to protect 30% of land and oceans by 2030, halving the use of pesticides, restoring billions of hectares of degraded soil, etc.
“We’ve made tremendous progress,” said Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s environment minister, who is hosting the summit.
Building on the progress of the past few hours, the Chinese President of the COP15 promised to transmit to the different countries a “proposed text” at 8:00 a.m. (1:00 p.m. GMT) on Sunday, which will be “ambitious, balanced and applicable”. . .
However, many points are still hotly debated in detail, especially with the countries of the South.
They fear too restrictive criteria that are incompatible with their development needs or their technical and financial resources.
– “We can not wait anymore” –
Developing countries, where most of the world’s biodiversity is found, also believe that the sharing of benefits of natural resources, a key objective of the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), has not occurred.
In order to commit to ambitious goals, they therefore ask for 100 billion dollars a year. The amount, modeled on the broken international climate aid pledge, would represent a tenfold increase in current transfers from North to South in terms of biodiversity.
The countries of the South are therefore still pushing for the creation of a new separate fund, like the one received in November, to help them deal with climate damage.
“I think we will reach an agreement, the question is its quality: we need ambition in both funding and conservation goals,” commented Li Shuo, an adviser at Greenpeace.
The optimism is shared by Wildlife Conservation Society adviser Alfred DeGemmis, although “much work and careful trade-offs still need to be worked out” for “governments to seize this opportunity, perhaps the last, to avoid mass extinction.”
Several preliminary texts on technical but essential issues released on Saturday pointed to a final agreement.
One of the documents concerns the monitoring and control mechanisms that are essential to avoid repeating the previous failure. The other concerns the promise to solve a sensitive issue for the South: the failure to share with them the benefits of medicinal or cosmetic products derived from their biological resources.
“There is a moral obligation” to stop biodiversity loss, more than 3,100 researchers from 128 countries say in an open letter on Saturday, fearing negotiations will stall.
“It’s achievable if we act now and decisively,” and “we owe it to ourselves and to future generations — we can’t wait any longer,” they said.
Because time is running out: 75% of the world’s ecosystems are largely altered by human activities, more than a million species on the planet are threatened with extinction, etc.
And beyond the moral implications, the whole world’s prosperity is at stake, the experts say: More than half of the world’s GDP depends on nature and its services.