Climate & Biodiversity: Converging Conventions?
COP26 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is due to take place in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021. In May 2021, COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity is due to be held in Kunming, China. With their shared membership of state Parties, and increasing overlap and interaction between biodiversity loss and climate change, there needs to be a convergence and mutual support between the two Conventions.
The Intergovernmental body that studies biodiversity and ecosystems, IPBES, issued a major report and Global Assessment in 2019. This found that humans have extensively altered 75% of the Earth’s land surface and 66% of the oceans. This may lead within decades to the extinction of 1 million species. A number of factors are driving this mass extinction. On land, they include land-use change and direct over-exploitation. In the marine ecosystem, it is more over-exploitation, such as overfishing. However, both land and oceans are adversely affected by climate change.
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was agreed at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, and the CBD came into force in 1993. With 196 Parties, almost the whole world has signed up to and ratified the CBD.
Article 1 of the CBD declares that -
“The objectives of this Convention, to be pursued in accordance with its relevant provisions, are the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources, including by appropriate access to genetic resources and by appropriate transfer of relevant technologies, taking into account all rights over those resources and to technologies, and by appropriate funding.”
The CBD has two important supplementary agreements.
The Cartagena Protocol, in force from 2003, seeks to protect biological diversity from the potential risks posed by living modified organisms resulting from modern technology. An example would be altering the genetic code of plants and then releasing them into the wider environment. 172 Parties have ratified the Cartagena Protocol.
The Nagoya Protocol, in force from 2014, aims at sharing the benefits arising from the use of genetic resources in a fair and equitable way, including by appropriate access to genetic resources and by appropriate transfer of relevant technologies. For example, there have been instances of indigenous peoples sharing the knowledge of traditional medicinal plants with biotech researchers, who then then analyse the plants and patent the valuable characteristics identified, selling the patented products back to the countries which gave them the genetic resources in the first place. 124 Parties have ratified the Nagoya Protocol.
We know that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Paris Agreement on Climate Change agreed in 2015 and now ratified by 189 Parties, address the critical issue of man made climate change and global warming. We have seen that CO2 levels in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million in 2013 for the first time in human history, and have continued rising. The 26th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCC, COP26 in Glasgow will be looking for ways to give effect to the landmark Paris Agreement to commit to limiting global warming from climate change and emissions to well below 2°C, with efforts to limits it further to 1.5°C.
Climate Change affects biodiversity directly, and radically, just as it will affect human populations, farming, coastal countries and climate refugees. The difference between 1.5°C and 2.0°C of global warming could be the survival or disappearance of 99% of the world’s coral reefs, which in themselves are huge reservoirs of biodiversity. Protection of biodiversity could be equally important to climate change. One draft of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework would seek to commit Parties to achieving 30% of the goals of the Paris Agreement through nature-based solutions. Forests are some of the key ‘sinks and reservoirs’ that the Paris Agreement refers to, but are being lost at a headlong rate.
Image courtesy of Janusk Maniak via Unsplash
Between 1990 and 2016, the world lost 502,000 square miles of forest, according to the World Bank, an area larger than South Africa, Some 17% of the Amazon rainforest has been lost in the last 50 years, and losses are accelerating.
Much of the membership of the Conventions is shared. We need the two Conventions to converge, and have clearer declarations of mutual support. Man made climate change and the loss of biodiversity are two manifestations of very similar issues, and they need to be tackled together.