Canadian Minister of the Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault, left, hugs French Minister of Environment and Ecological Transition Christophe Bechu after roughly 190 countries agreed on a historic plan to halt the decline of wildlife and ecosystems in Montreal, Canada, on December 19. | Lars Hagberg/AFP via Getty Images
At the UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, world leaders agreed to a historic plan to halt biodiversity loss.
MONTREAL, Canada — Early Monday morning, after several days of fraught negotiations, roughly 190 countries agreed on a historic plan to halt the decline of wildlife and ecosystems.
Adopted at a UN biodiversity conference called COP15, the agreement contains 23 targets that countries must achieve within the decade. They include conserving at least 30 percent of all land and water on Earth by 2030 — the largest land and ocean conservation commitment in history — and shrinking subsidies for activities that harm nature, such as industrial fishing.
The agreement, known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, also commits rich countries to pay developing nations $30 billion a year by 2030 for conservation. That’s roughly a tripling of existing aid.
UN Biodiversity
Environment minister from China, Huang Runqiu, president of COP15, and other delegates and officials celebrate the adoption of the global biodiversity framework on December 19.
Environmental advocates say that this agreement is our last chance to avoid far-reaching ecological collapse. Ecosystems and the services they provide, such as insect pollination for commercial crops, are vanishing, as companies and governments bulldoze forests and prairies, and heat the Earth with greenhouse gases. One million species are now at risk of extinction and many wildlife populations have, on average, declined by nearly 70 percent in the last half-century.
“The figures are terrifying,” Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International, the world’s largest environmental organization, told Vox. “We’ve lost almost half of the forests, half of the coral reefs. It’s really, really bad.”
Biodiversity talks tend to draw far less attention than similar UN climate events — less than, say, the recent climate conference in Egypt. Only a couple of heads of state showed up at COP15 and there were no major celebrities. Yet the agreement the conference produced is momentous with wide-ranging implications for corporations, financial institutes, Indigenous groups, and governments.
“We have taken a great step forward in history today,” Steven Guilbeault, Canada’s minister of environment and climate change, said.
The main question now is whether nations will be able to achieve all 23 of the targets by the eight-year deadline, and what happens if they don’t. Unlike the Paris Agreement, the biodiversity framework is not legally binding.
Here’s what you need to know about the landmark deal.
Countries agreed to nearly two dozen targets including conserving at least 30 percent of Earth within the decade
First, some quick lingo: COP15 is a meeting of countries that are members of a UN treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity. You can think of the treaty as a contract between member countries to collectively sustain biodiversity and its benefits. Every country other than the Vatican is a member — except the US.
These meetings are usually chaotic, hard to follow, and overlooked by mainstream media. But this year’s event was slightly different because of a document at its center: the global biodiversity framework.
One key distinction between this document and the Paris agreement is its complexity and scale; the Paris agreement was largely focused on one goal — to limit warming to below 1.5 degrees — whereas this text contains a wide range of ambitious objectives including a target to conserve at least 30 percent of all land and water by 2030, known as 30 by 30.
Although more than 100 countries had already agreed to 30 by 30 before COP15, it was still a point of contention in Montreal. For one, it wasn’t clear what would count as “conserved” land.
In the final form, the agreement indicates that a handful of different types of land can count toward the 30 percent target, including formal protected areas (such as national parks) and, in some cases, Indigenous territories. Indigenous leaders had been worried that any effort to expand the global network of protected areas might come at the expense of their land rights. Historically, Western environmentalists evicted Indigenous groups to set up national parks, said Jennifer Corpuz, a Filipino Indigenous lawyer and key negotiator for the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity.
The final agreement explicitly acknowledges that countries must respect the rights of Indigenous groups as they seek to conserve more land.
“The text provides a strong basis for countries to walk hand-in-hand with Indigenous peoples in addressing the biodiversity crisis and in ensuring that the negative legacy of conservation on Indigenous peoples will be corrected,” Corpuz said in a statement Monday.
Andrej Ivanov/AFP via Getty Images
A person takes a picture by the COP15 logo in front of the Palais des Congres at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, Canada, on December 17.
Through another key target, the biodiversity agreement seeks to require that large companies disclose their impacts on nature and how the decline of ecosystems affects their profits. For example, a large company that sells cacao might have to reveal how its farms impact forests and how the decline of pollinators affects its cacao production.
The idea is that by giving shareholders and consumers more insight into a company’s footprint and nature-related risks, money will move away from companies that harm the environment and toward those that help restore it, according to Eva Zabey, executive director of a coalition called Business for Nature.
Each of the targets plays some role in stemming biodiversity loss, but there are a handful of other ones that stand out.
Target 2, for example, commits countries to restore at least 30 percent of natural land that’s been degraded, such as native prairie damaged by industrial farming, whereas target 10 calls on countries to make sure farmland, fisheries, and other working lands are managed sustainably. Two of the targets also support nature-based solutions, a loosely defined buzzword, that tends to apply to actions that help ecosystems and ourselves, such as restoring coral reefs to control flooding during hurricanes.
But arguably, the most important part of the framework is about money: Who will pay for conservation?
The topic that almost derailed the talks
A number often repeated in the meeting rooms at COP15 was $700 billion. It’s a rough estimate of the total gap in funding for biodiversity conservation worldwide, according to a widely cited 2020 report. The report found that adequately conserving nature costs, on average, about $844 billion a year, yet the world spends only a fraction of that. It costs money to set up and manage protected areas, make agriculture more sustainable, and so on.
Mike Muzurakis/International Institute for Sustainable Development
Delegates meet to negotiate language in COP15 text.
Much of the air at COP15 was sucked up by conversations about how to close that massive financial gap. They centered around three issues:
1) How much money will the world commit, in total, to biodiversity each year?
2) How much of that money will wealthy nations give to developing countries?
3) And who will manage and distribute the money?
Negotiations reached a tipping point last week when delegates from developing countries including Brazil, India, and Indonesia walked out of budget talks. They felt that rich nations weren’t open to discussing increases to foreign aid. “Financing is always the achilles’ heel of every global agreement,” Florian Titze, a policy advisor at WWF Germany, said at a press conference earlier this month.
But by early Monday morning, delegates had reached an agreement: They committed to spending $200 billion per year on conservation by the end of the decade, which includes public, private, and philanthropic support. This money will help close the finance gap, but not completely.
Importantly, $20 billion of that money will be aid from rich nations to developing countries — which harbor most of the world’s remaining biodiversity — by 2025. That number increases to $30 billion a year by 2030.
The framework not only provides more money for conservation but also aims to redirect government funds away from activities that harm nature. Countries spend as much as $1.8 trillion on subsidies that damage ecosystems, including those for fossil fuels, according to a 2022 study. Under one of the targets, countries pledged to identify harmful subsidies by 2025 and then, by 2030, shrink them by at least $500 billion a year.
Even all of these financial commitments, however, likely won’t be enough to meet the goals of the framework, said John Tobin, a professor of finance at Cornell University (who coauthored the report that identified the $700 billion gap). There has to be a more wholesale shift in the economy, he said, toward business activities that benefit nature.
One positive sign in that direction was the sheer presence of financial institutes at COP15. It was unlike any other COP under the Convention on Biological Diversity, he said, and shows that the finance sector is finally paying attention.
Will any of this actually make a difference?
The world has, in a sense, been here before. In 2010, at a similar UN biodiversity meeting, countries pledged to reach a set of 20 targets, known as the Aichi Targets, within 10 years. Those targets might sound familiar: They included things like eliminating harmful subsidies and halving the loss of natural habitats, such as forests.
None of the targets were met. Not one. So it’s fair to ask: What’s different this time? Is there really any hope for this new agreement?
The Aichi Targets failed, experts say, for two main reasons: they lacked funding, and they lacked a monitoring and reporting system — essentially, a way to measure progress toward each target and hold each country accountable. “If there’s one thing that we learned from Aichi it’s that you need to monitor,” said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity.
Along with the biodiversity framework, delegates published a plan to measure progress, whether it be simply monitoring the coverage of protected areas across the globe, or making a list of companies that publicly disclose their impacts and dependencies on ecosystems. Every few years, countries will meet to check on those indicators, and review their progress.
Naturally, the agreement isn’t perfect
Early Monday, moments before the biodiversity framework appeared ready to be adopted, a delegate from the Democratic Republic of the Congo took to the floor, explaining that his country could not support the agreement. It came down to money, he said: Developing nations need more aid and it must be easy to access. Ultimately, his dissent did little to stop the framework from being adopted, but DRC is among a handful of countries that wanted more foreign aid.
There are also some goals and targets in the agreement that lack clear, numerical targets, according to Georgina Chandler, a senior international policy officer at The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. She explained that countries should, for example, commit to increasing animal populations by a certain percentage. But an exact number doesn’t appear anywhere in the current agreement.
Then there’s the question of accountability, considering that the agreement isn’t legally binding. Ensuring countries meet their targets will come down, in part, to peer pressure from other countries and the nonprofit community, said Andrew Deutz, director of global policy, institutions, and conservation finance at The Nature Conservancy. “It becomes a name and shame, but also a highlight and reward,” he said, referring to countries that are falling behind or out in front on their targets.
Ultimately, there’s no guarantee that this framework will work, that it will halt the decline of wildlife. But at least in this moment, the environmental movement is full of hope. And many people share the feeling that it has to work. It’s not just about saving animals but about safeguarding ecosystems that humans depend on. There’s no human life without wildlife.