The UN 15th Biodiversity Conference of the Parties kicks off today, Wednesday, December 7, in Montreal, Canada, after a two-year postponement due to the pandemic.
The conference, or COP15, as it is known, will see thousands of delegates representing 192 countries spend the next two weeks hammering out a once-in-a-decade agreement which aims to build a more sustainable relationship between humans and nature’s biodiversity.
If all goes according to plan, the conference will produce a new agreement outlining global biodiversity and conservation goals for the next decade. The conference is supposed to wrap up on December 19 but negotiations may run into overtime.
These are the updates of what has come out of the conference so far, courtesy of our amazing colleagues at the World Wildlife Fund South Africa, who are on the ground in Montreal.
The ceremonial opening of COP15 took place in the afternoon. This featured a ceremonial welcome by the traditional Chief of the Canadian Onondaga Nation, the native people of Canada, Tadodaho Sid Hill, before addresses by a number of speakers including representatives of Canada and China, as the host and presidency countries.
Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau highlighted the importance of protecting 30% of the world’s land and water by 2030 (“30 by 30”) in efforts to halt and reverse the loss of nature this decade, and urged all leaders to tell their negotiators to bring this ambition over the next two weeks.
Stressing the importance of all work to protect nature being reflective of indigenous ways of knowing and being in true partnership, Trudeau went on to announce $350 million in new international biodiversity finance – a critical signal at the start of COP that developed countries are willing to step up to support conservation efforts in developing countries.
UN secretary-general António Guterres delivered a typically powerful speech, describing a “war on nature” and calling humanity “a weapon of mass extinction”. He urged humankind to make peace by adopting an ambitious framework in Montreal.
The Chinese minister of ecology and environment, Huang Runqiu, stressed the need for all at COP15 to work together for a just and equitable global agreement for nature.
Negotiations will start in earnest tomorrow with the opening plenary and a discussion of the organisation of work. This will set the direction of how parties will be negotiating the global biodiversity framework in the next two weeks and how they intend to agree on the many bracketed elements of the text.
Commenting on the announcement of $350m in new international biodiversity finance, Megan Leslie, president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund Canada, said that “setting a global plan to reverse biodiversity loss will not be easy. It will require new commitments to nature that go beyond anything we’ve seen before”.
“Canada’s announcement of new funding for nature conservation in developing countries shows important leadership and sets the tone for this critical moment for biodiversity.”
IOL