The top politicians must enter – Dagsavisen
The world is facing serious global environmental crises: man-made climate change and loss of biodiversity. However, the fact that the two crises are big is not reflected in any way when global summits are held on the themes.
There was enormous political attention around the COP27 summit for the Climate Convention, which took place in Sharm el-Sheikh in November, with a number of presidents and prime ministers present. This is not the case when the summit for the Convention on Biodiversity COP15 is organized these days in Montreal.
Here, one can at best hope that a number of environment ministers, with low status in their government hierarchies, will appear. China, the country that has the chairmanship of COP15 and should have hosted if it had not been for covid-19, has done nothing to change this situation – quite the opposite. China has completely failed to invite heads of state to COP15.
This despite the fact that much is at stake in Montreal.
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We are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction. The decline in biodiversity has not been greater since the dinosaurs died out. In addition to losing our fellow creatures, this loss of biodiversity also means that ecosystems become unstable and are in danger of collapsing.
Such a collapse will have serious consequences for us humans, who depend on ecosystem services in the form of clean air, water, food and other necessities of life. It is estimated that half of the global gross national product is dependent on nature’s services.
As with climate change, it is the poorest and most vulnerable people who bear the brunt of the loss of biodiversity. The climate and biodiversity crisis are not separate dimensions. They are inextricably linked, something that you want for biodiversity earns as much political attention as climate.
Climate change is a major reason why biodiversity is declining. At the same time, large ecosystems for biodiversity, such as oceans and forests, are also important for the climate as they absorb large amounts of CO2. Preserving intact ecosystems with rich biodiversity is a bulwark against the natural disasters that climate change brings with it in the form of storms, floods and droughts.
Therefore, we must develop nature-based solutions to deal with the climate and biodiversity crises in context. Nature-based solutions are measures based on nature and take on major challenges such as climate change, pollution and securing water resources, while at the same time benefiting biodiversity.
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21 22 proposed global goals, and many other proposals for decisions, are designed in square parents, something that marks that the countries are not the only ones.
At COP15, the countries of the world must adopt a global framework agreement with concrete targets towards 2030 to stop and reverse the loss of biodiversity. The agreement is to replace the global biodiversity targets for 2020, which are nowhere near being met.
A fundamental premise of the plan and its goals is that it commits governments across economic sectors – including industry, agriculture, forestry and fisheries – and not just environmental departments.
Many hope for a «Paris moment»; a groundbreaking breakthrough for biodiversity in line with the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate. Others, on the other hand, fear a «Copenhagen moment», referring to the climate summit in Copenhagen in 2009, which ended in a major negotiation breakdown.
Despite long and painstaking negotiation processes in the run-up to the summit, the countries have not progressed far enough to expect political momentum. 21 22 proposed global goals, and many other proposals for decisions, are designed in square parents, something that marks that the countries are not the only ones.
As in the climate negotiations, the question of how much resources must be transferred from developed countries to developing countries is also a central point of disagreement here.
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Another important issue on which the parties are far apart is whether a global mechanism should be developed to assess countries’ efforts in relation to the global goals, as has been achieved in the Paris Agreement. Nor are you alone in aiming for nature-based solutions that simultaneously achieve biodiversity and climate.
What we need to achieve is that COP15 breaks the tradition of the political level being weakly represented in the global biodiversity negotiations.
Without ministers to take over the negotiations and finally cut through and a political responsibility, as they do in the climate negotiations, the ambitious, global target for biodiversity will not be achieved.