A wind of optimism was blowing on Saturday at COP15 for biodiversity where a compromise agreement seemed to be emerging even if the financial question remained unresolved.
“I am very confident that we will be able to maintain our ambitions and get an agreement,” Chinese Environment Minister Huang Runqiu, president of COP15, told reporters on Saturday.
The ambition of this COP on biodiversity remains to seal by December 19 an agreement on biodiversity as historic as that of Paris for the climate in 2015.
In the absence of Heads of State or Government at this summit of the decade, crucial for humanity and the planet, the Ministers of the Environment were hard at work for the third and last day in a row.
The text is intended as a roadmap for nations until 2030, the last ten-year plan signed in Japan in 2010 having achieved none of its objectives, in particular due to the absence of monitoring mechanisms.
Among the main objectives of the project is the commitment to protect 30% of the land and oceans by 2030, the halving of the use of pesticides, the restoration of billions of hectares of degraded land.
“We have made tremendous progress,” said Steven Guilbeault, Environment Minister of Canada, the country hosting the summit.
However, many points are still hotly debated in detail, especially with the countries of the South.
They fear criteria that are too restrictive, incompatible with their development needs or their technical and financial resources.
– “We can’t wait any longer” –
Developing countries, where most of the world’s biodiversity is found, also believe that the sharing of the benefits of natural resources, an objective at the heart of the 1992 Convention on Biodiversity, has not taken place.
To commit to an ambitious agreement, they therefore demand 100 billion dollars per year. The amount, modeled on that of the broken promise of international aid for the climate, would be equivalent to multiplying by ten the current transfers from the North to the South in respect of biodiversity.
The countries of the South are therefore still pushing for the creation of a new separate fund, like the one obtained by the South in November to deal with climate damage.
“I think we will get an agreement, the question is its quality: we need ambition as much on funding as on conservation targets”, commented Li Shuo, adviser at Greenpeace.
Several provisional texts published on Saturday on essential technical issues hinted at what the final agreement could be.
One of the documents concerns the monitoring and control mechanisms, which are essential in order not to repeat the failure of the previous agreement, the other concerns the sharing with the South of the benefit of biological resources allowing the manufacture of medicines or cosmetics in rich countries.
“There is a moral obligation” to stop the loss of biodiversity, say more than 3,100 researchers from 128 countries in an open letter on Saturday, worried about seeing the negotiations stall.
“It is 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: 70% of the world’s ecosystems are degraded, largely due to human activity, more than a million species are threatened with extinction on the planet, etc.
And beyond the moral implications, the whole world’s prosperity is at stake, say the experts: more than half of the world’s GDP depends on nature and its services.