Humanity stands at crossroads to protect biodiversity: COP15 president

The UN Biodiversity Conference began December 7, 2022, bringing together 193 countries. With this, three meetings — the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the tenth Meeting of the Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety and the fourth Meeting of the Parties to the Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing — commenced.

 Also read: Mexican indigenous groups yet to benefit under Nagoya Protocol; here is why

At the plenary meeting, opening statements were delivered by major stakeholders on the expectations from the meeting. They highlighted the issues that need to be addressed during the meeting.

Huang Runqiu, the minister of ecology and environment of China and president of COP15, declared the meetings open.

He pointed out:

While biodiversity is the foundation of human survival and development, Earth has lost 100 million hectares of tropical forest, over 85 per cent of wetland and 25 per cent of species are threatened with the danger of extinction. 

These changes are shaking the foundation of our sustainable development goals and are undermining our well-being, he added.

“Humanity stands at crossroads to protect biodiversity and achieve global sustainable development,” he said. 

During the conference, the discussions have been divided between two working groups.

The discussions on the crucial Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) would take place on the agenda of working group one. The group would also look at controversial issues such as digital sequence information and finances.

Also read: Legal, controlled trade of wild species can have many benefits: CITES report

However, these discussions would happen in the different contact groups and would not be available in the public domain. Multiple contact groups have been established already.

These groups will look at issues such as digital sequence information on genetic sources; resource mobilisation; the financial mechanism; capacity-building and technical and scientific mechanisms for planning, monitoring, reporting, and review; and biodiversity mainstreaming.

The Post-2020 GBF is the biggest item on the agenda. Over the last four years, multiple meetings have been organised to ensure that a strong framework is put in place.

Unfortunately, even after the fifth meeting of the open-ended working group held just before the UN conference, the text remains riddled with brackets which denote the failure of the negotiators to agree on the points.

The last framework text shared by the secretariat on the night of December 6 includes two new targets over the 22 targets, which are already part of the text.

Parties had divergent views on the inclusion of these target in the Post-2020 GBF; these two targets are currently in square brackets.

The new targets are as follows:

• Implement biodiversity-inclusive One Health approaches — focusing especially on the risks of the emergence and transmission of zoonotic diseases — to avoid or reduce risks to the health of humans, wild and domesticated species and ecosystems. 
• Fair and equitable benefit sharing for potential pandemic pathogens — including improved access to zoonosis response tools — to be realised by adopting a Specialized International Instrument by the World Health Assembly before 2025 and its recognition by the CBD at COP17. 

Inger Andersen, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, requested the participants to remove brackets and finalise the Post-2020 GBF text during the next few days. “The world is pinning its hopes on you,” she said.

This meeting is our chance to move from disharmony to harmony to stop the orgy of destruction and conclude a peace pact with nature, said Runqiu.

“I believe all parties and stakeholders share my urgent desire to reverse the global trend of biodiversity loss and stop the war on nature,” Runqiu added.

The moment needs to mark the beginning of a transformative change, said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, at the opening of the plenary.

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