STEVEN GRATTAN
Sun, October 20, 2024
BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Global environmental leaders gather Monday in Cali, Colombia to assess the world’s plummeting biodiversity levels and commitments by countries to protect plants, animals and critical habitats.
The two-week United Nations Biodiversity Conference, or COP16, is a follow-up to the 2022 Montreal meetings where 196 countries signed a historic global treaty to protect biodiversity.
The accord includes 23 measures to halt and reverse nature loss, including putting 30% of the planet and 30% of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030.
“We hope that (COP16) will be an opportunity for countries to get to work and focus on implementation, monitoring and compliance mechanisms that then have to be developed in their countries and in their national plans,” said Laura Rico, campaign director at Avaaz, a global activism nonprofit.
A real threat to biodiversity loss
All evidence shows dramatic decline in species abundance and distribution, said Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity at The Nature Conservancy.
“A lot of wild species have less room to live, and they’re declining in numbers,” Krueger said. “And we also see rising extinction rates. Things that we haven’t even discovered yet are blinking out.”
The world is experiencing its largest loss of life since the dinosaurs, with around 1 million plant and animal species now threatened with extinction, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.
In the Amazon rainforest, threats to biodiversity include the expansion of the agricultural frontier and road networks, deforestation, forest fires and drought, says Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch, an organization that protects the rainforest.
“You put all of that together and it’s a real threat to biodiversity,” Miller said.
Global wildlife populations have plunged on average by 73% in 50 years, according to the WWF and the Zoological Society of London biennial Living Planet report this month.
The report said Latin America and the Caribbean saw 95% average declines in recorded wildlife populations.
Indigenous communities key to biodiversity protection
Indigenous people are on the front lines of protecting biodiversity and fighting against climate change, putting their lives at great risk, said Miller of Amazon Watch.
“A lot of discourse has been given about the voices of local communities … Indigenous peoples really playing a key role,” he said. “So that’s one of the things that we’ll be looking for at COP16.”
Indigenous peoples hold the solutions to combat the climate change and biodiversity crises, Rico said.
“They're who have been taking care of the land, healing the land through their governance systems, their care systems and their ways of life,” she said. “So ... it's fundamental that the COP recognizes, promotes and encourages the legalization of their territories.”
In Colombia’s capital, Bogota, the head of an Amazon Indigenous organization said the region's Indigenous people have been preparing for months for COP16.
“This is a great opportunity to make the impact that we need to demonstrate to all the actors that come from other countries the importance of Indigenous peoples for the world,” said José Mendez, secretary of the National Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon.
“It's no secret to anyone that we ... are at risk right now,” he said. “The effects that we are currently experiencing due to climate change, the droughts that the country is experiencing, the Amazon River has never gone through a drought like the current one. … This is causing many species to become extinct.”
Nature can recover
Colombia’s environment minister Susana Muhamad, who is presiding over COP16, told local media this month that one of the conference's main objectives is to deliver the message that “biodiversity is as important, complementary and indispensable as the energy transition and decarbonization.”
Part of Colombia's first ever leftist government, Muhamad cautioned last year's World Economic Forum about the risks of continuing an extractive economy that ignores the social and environmental consequences of natural resource exploitation.
Since the 2022 Montreal conference, “progress has been too slow”, says Eva Zabey, executive director of the coalition Business for Nature.
“There's been some progress," she said. “But the headline message is the implementation of the global biodiversity framework is too slow and we need to scale and speed up.”
“COP16 comes at an absolutely critical moment for us to move from targets setting to real actions on the ground,” Zabey said.
Although biodiversity declines are grim, some environmentalists believe a reversal is possible. “We’ve had some very successful species reintroductions and we’ve saved species when we really focus on what is causing their decline,” said The Nature Conservancy's Krueger.
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'The world is a mess' warns renowned zoologist Jane Goodall ahead of Cop16
RFI
Sun, October 20, 2024
British primate expert Jane Goodall wants a coming United Nations summit on biodiversity to lead to action rather than "words and false promises". Seen here at a World Economic Forum in 2020.
As officials from around 200 countries prepare to meet in Colombia for the Cop16 biodiversity summit starting Monday, world-respected British zoologist Jane Goodall said there was little time left to reverse the downward slide. She wants the United Nations meeting to lead to action rather than "words and false promises".
"What keeps me going is that right now, the world is a mess," Goodall told RFI. "I care really passionately about the natural world, the environment, not just the chimpanzees, but all the other animals, but I also care about children. I care about the people around the world who are suffering so much today."
Goodall has been a UN Messenger of Peace since 2002 and has used this platform to raise awareness about the damage done to nature.
At 90, she is still crisscrossing the globe in a bid to help defend the chimpanzee, who she first went to Tanzania to study more than 60 years ago.
"I was given a gift, and when I speak, people listen. And people who are losing hope, I seem to be able to give them more hope, to enable everyone to roll up their sleeves and take action," she told RFI ahead of her talk at Unesco in Paris on Saturday.
Her visit to the French capital comes just two days ahead of the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia.
Reverse species destruction
Themed "Peace with Nature," it has the urgent task of coming up with monitoring and funding mechanisms to ensure that 23 UN targets agreed in 2022 to halt and reverse species destruction can be met by 2030.
(with AFP)
UN chief seeks 'significant' funding at summit to save nature
Mariëtte Le Roux
Sun, October 20, 2024
More than a quarter of assessed plant and animal species are threatened with extinction (Raul ARBOLEDA) (Raul ARBOLEDA/AFP/AFP)
UN chief Antonio Guterres on Sunday urged "significant investment" in a fund created to safeguard Earth's biodiversity as he addressed delegates to the world's biggest nature protection conference in Cali, Colombia.
The meeting, which officially opens Monday, had a ceremonial kickoff with Cali on high alert after threats from a guerrilla group.
Guterres made a video address to guests gathered for the event taking place under the protection of thousands of Colombian police and soldiers, aided by UN and US security personnel.
"We must leave Cali with significant investment in the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), and commitments to mobilize other sources of public and private finance," the secretary general said.
The GBFF was created last year to help countries achieve the goals of the so-called Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) adopted in Canada in 2022 with 23 targets to "halt and reverse" the loss of nature by 2030.
So far, countries have made about $250 million in commitments to the fund, according to agencies monitoring progress.
The fund is part of a broader agreement made in Montreal two years ago for countries to mobilize at least $200 billion per year by 2030 for biodiversity, including $20 billion per year by 2025 from rich nations to help the developing world.
Guterres highlighted that destroying nature increases conflict, hunger and disease, fuels poverty and slashes GDP.
"A collapse in nature's services -- such as pollination, and clean water -- would see the global economy lose trillions of dollars a year, with the poorest hardest hit," he said.
Avoiding such a future would entail countries "honoring promises on finance and accelerating support to developing countries," said Guterres.
"Those profiting from nature must contribute to its protection and restoration," he added.
- 'Peace with nature' -
About 12,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries, including 140 government ministers and a dozen heads of state were due to attend the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), running until November 1.
Themed "Peace with Nature," it has the urgent task of coming up with monitoring and funding mechanisms to ensure the 23 UN targets can be met.
But Colombia's EMC rebel group, a splinter of the FARC guerrilla army that disbanded in 2017, has cast a shadow over the event by urging foreign delegations to stay away and warning the conference "will fail."
The threat came after EMC fighters were targeted in a military raid in the southwest Cauca department, where the group is accused of engaging in drug trafficking and illegal mining.
Cali is the nearest big city to territory controlled by the EMC, which has been engaged in fraught peace negotiations with the government.
Colombian President Gustavo Petro also attended Sunday's ceremonial event, two days after saying he was "nervous" about security.
Cali's mayor Alejandro Eder insisted, however, that "we have been working since February to safeguard the city of Cali... We have more than 10,000 police officers, we also have detachments of the Colombian Armed Forces guarding the entire perimeter of the city. We have air protection, protection against drones."
- Time running out -
The delegates have their work cut out for them, with just five years left to achieve the target of placing 30 percent of land and sea areas under protection by 2030.
World-renowned British primate expert Jane Goodall warned ahead of the summit there was little time to reverse the downward slide.
"The time for words and false promises is past if we want to save the planet," Goodall told AFP this week.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which keeps a red list of threatened animals and plants, more than a quarter of assessed species -- about a million altogether -- are threatened with extinction.
Host Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, and Petro has made environmental protection a priority.
But the country has struggled to extricate itself from six decades of armed conflict between leftist guerrillas such as the EMC, right-wing paramilitaries, drug gangs, and the state.
mlr/bjt
Colombia Biodiversity Conference
Colombia's President Gustavo Petro delivers a speech at the opening ceremony of COP16, a United Nations' biodiversity conference, in Cali, Colombia, Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024.
(AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)
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