New biodiversity pact sets ambitious targets, but will nations deliver? | Science

Scientists are cautiously optimistic about the new global biodiversity pact that emerged from down-to-the-wire negotiations in Montreal this week. Given the vast amount of disputed text at the start of the conference—spanning 265 pages—observers were surprised and delighted that 190 countries managed to beat the clock on Monday and release a final agreement that sets a wide range of targets for protecting nature.

“To me, it’s a miracle,” says Binbin Li, a conservation biologist at Duke Kunshan University in China, who attended the conference as an observer.

Past biodiversity agreements have led to little progress. But the new pact sets more specific targets than before, such as protecting 30% of Earth’s lands and oceans, and includes a promise to equitably share any benefits derived from sequencing the genomes of wild organisms. Money and monitoring mechanisms remain a question, however. “How do we take all these great ideas and make them happen in 8 years, which is very little time?” asks conservation biologist Jon Paul Rodríguez of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigations. “We know what we need to do, but not how we’re going to do it.”

Observers note that governments failed to reach any of the previous goals set by parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a global agreement that counts all but the United States and three other nations as members. CBD goals set in 2020, known as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets after the prefecture in Japan where delegates met, included calls to reduce threats to biodiversity and help species and ecosystems recover. But many of the goals “were so vague and confusing, it was hard to tell what you had to do to deliver,” says Susan Lieberman of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

This year’s CBD meeting, which was moved to Montreal after the COVID-19 pandemic upended an original plan to meet in China last year, aimed for greater clarity. Negotiators spent 3 years drafting the new framework, which includes a total of 23 targets. But when the meeting began earlier this month, about 80% of a draft text contained brackets indicating a lack of consensus, and efforts to overcome the differences got off to a slow start. Nations had strongly held views on some key issues, Li says, but negotiators also got “stuck on some trivial things.”

The final night of talks featured last minute drama. At about 3:30 a.m., representatives from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has much of the planet’s second largest extent of intact tropical forest, objected to plans for how biodiversity conservation would be supported and called for more funding. But they were promptly overruled by the presiding official, China’s minister of the environment, who brought down the gavel and declared the framework adopted. “The way the final agreement was pushed through has only reinforced the acrimony that’s been in the process,” says David Obura, a sustainability scientist who directs CORDIO East Africa, a conservation think tank that focuses on the western Indian Ocean.

The new framework sets four main goals to be achieved by 2050. The first calls for ensuring the integrity of ecosystems, preventing extinctions, and conserving genetic diversity. A second highlights the sustainable use of natural resources. The third calls for the sharing of benefits from genetic resources, including digital sequence information. The fourth is sufficient funding and technical know-how to enable all nations to achieve the framework’s aims. For the first time, the framework also explicitly recognizes the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities in protecting biodiversity.

The framework also asks governments to meet specific targets by 2030. In addition to expanding protected areas, they include cutting nutrient pollution in half and reducing the risk from pesticides by 90%. Nations should also eliminate $500 billion in harmful subsidies, such as providing cheap fuel for long-distance fishing fleets.

Conservation advocates had hoped for more instances of specific action. For example, the targets do not mention key biodiversity areas, a well-defined term used in global efforts to protect highly valuable habitat. Omitting this term from the framework targets “sets us up for designation of protected areas in areas of low biodiversity value,” Rodríguez warns.

Overall, however, the clarity of the targets represents a big change from previous biodiversity frameworks, says Andrew Gonzalez, a biodiversity scientist at McGill University who represented the Biodiversity Observation Network at the conference.

That doesn’t mean achieving the goals will be easy. Nations that have already committed to cutting nutrient pollution and pesticide use, for example, have found the task daunting. And there are gaps in the monitoring plan, which relies on frequent meetings to assess progress, says Thomas Brooks, chief scientist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It is “a really important step forward,” he says, but it lacks specific indicators that can be used to track progress on the sustainable use of natural resources and sharing the benefits of genetic resources.

Researchers could help the CBD technical committees tasked with developing the indicators, Obura says. Those panels can help “embed better science in the indicators,” he says.

Scientists also see promise in the framework’s approach to the use of genetic sequence information, which has long been entangled in fiery disagreements over the ownership and use of genetic resources, such as pharmaceutical compounds found in plants. In particular, it creates a multilateral mechanism to share benefits, including a global fund to collect and distribute monetary benefits from the commercialization of products based on the genomic data.

“This is a great outcome,” says Amber Hartman Scholz, a microbiologist and head of the science policy department at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures. The design avoids issues that plagued other proposals, such as cumbersome regulatory requirements that many scientists feared could chill research and the use of genetic sequence information. In addition, the new mechanism is likely to generate more funds than past proposals, she says, and contribute to biodiversity conservation and the growth of the bioeconomy.

Conservation itself will need more funding, however. At the conference, nations agreed to create a special account for biodiversity conservation within the Global Environment Facility, an intergovernmental body that distributes donor funds. They also pledged to increase their total contributions to $30 billion per year by 2030. But CBD estimates meeting the new goals will require an additional $700 billion a year.

Still, Gonzalez says, protecting biodiversity now has widespread support. “I think we’re going to see a wave of action for biodiversity that will be quite different than the previous decade,” he says. Citing action by cities and commitments from large companies, he says, “I’m actually pretty optimistic.”

But the clock is ticking, Li says. “Biodiversity is what will buffer us from [natural disasters due to climate change and other] disturbances and keep our society stable and resilient,” she says. “We do not have much more time to fail again.”

Scientists are cautiously optimistic about the new global biodiversity pact that emerged from down-to-the-wire negotiations in Montreal this week. Given the vast amount of disputed text at the start of the conference—spanning 265 pages—observers were surprised and delighted that 190 countries managed to beat the clock on Monday and release a final agreement that sets a wide range of targets for protecting nature.

“To me, it’s a miracle,” says Binbin Li, a conservation biologist at Duke Kunshan University in China, who attended the conference as an observer.

Past biodiversity agreements have led to little progress. But the new pact sets more specific targets than before, such as protecting 30% of Earth’s lands and oceans, and includes a promise to equitably share any benefits derived from sequencing the genomes of wild organisms. Money and monitoring mechanisms remain a question, however. “How do we take all these great ideas and make them happen in 8 years, which is very little time?” asks conservation biologist Jon Paul Rodríguez of the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Investigations. “We know what we need to do, but not how we’re going to do it.”

Observers note that governments failed to reach any of the previous goals set by parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a global agreement that counts all but the United States and three other nations as members. CBD goals set in 2020, known as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets after the prefecture in Japan where delegates met, included calls to reduce threats to biodiversity and help species and ecosystems recover. But many of the goals “were so vague and confusing, it was hard to tell what you had to do to deliver,” says Susan Lieberman of the Wildlife Conservation Society.

This year’s CBD meeting, which was moved to Montreal after the COVID-19 pandemic upended an original plan to meet in China last year, aimed for greater clarity. Negotiators spent 3 years drafting the new framework, which includes a total of 23 targets. But when the meeting began earlier this month, about 80% of a draft text contained brackets indicating a lack of consensus, and efforts to overcome the differences got off to a slow start. Nations had strongly held views on some key issues, Li says, but negotiators also got “stuck on some trivial things.”

The final night of talks featured last minute drama. At about 3:30 a.m., representatives from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which has much of the planet’s second largest extent of intact tropical forest, objected to plans for how biodiversity conservation would be supported and called for more funding. But they were promptly overruled by the presiding official, China’s minister of the environment, who brought down the gavel and declared the framework adopted. “The way the final agreement was pushed through has only reinforced the acrimony that’s been in the process,” says David Obura, a sustainability scientist who directs CORDIO East Africa, a conservation think tank that focuses on the western Indian Ocean.

The new framework sets four main goals to be achieved by 2050. The first calls for ensuring the integrity of ecosystems, preventing extinctions, and conserving genetic diversity. A second highlights the sustainable use of natural resources. The third calls for the sharing of benefits from genetic resources, including digital sequence information. The fourth is sufficient funding and technical know-how to enable all nations to achieve the framework’s aims. For the first time, the framework also explicitly recognizes the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities in protecting biodiversity.

The framework also asks governments to meet specific targets by 2030. In addition to expanding protected areas, they include cutting nutrient pollution in half and reducing the risk from pesticides by 90%. Nations should also eliminate $500 billion in harmful subsidies, such as providing cheap fuel for long-distance fishing fleets.

Conservation advocates had hoped for more instances of specific action. For example, the targets do not mention key biodiversity areas, a well-defined term used in global efforts to protect highly valuable habitat. Omitting this term from the framework targets “sets us up for designation of protected areas in areas of low biodiversity value,” Rodríguez warns.

Overall, however, the clarity of the targets represents a big change from previous biodiversity frameworks, says Andrew Gonzalez, a biodiversity scientist at McGill University who represented the Biodiversity Observation Network at the conference.

That doesn’t mean achieving the goals will be easy. Nations that have already committed to cutting nutrient pollution and pesticide use, for example, have found the task daunting. And there are gaps in the monitoring plan, which relies on frequent meetings to assess progress, says Thomas Brooks, chief scientist at the International Union for Conservation of Nature. It is “a really important step forward,” he says, but it lacks specific indicators that can be used to track progress on the sustainable use of natural resources and sharing the benefits of genetic resources.

Researchers could help the CBD technical committees tasked with developing the indicators, Obura says. Those panels can help “embed better science in the indicators,” he says.

Scientists also see promise in the framework’s approach to the use of genetic sequence information, which has long been entangled in fiery disagreements over the ownership and use of genetic resources, such as pharmaceutical compounds found in plants. In particular, it creates a multilateral mechanism to share benefits, including a global fund to collect and distribute monetary benefits from the commercialization of products based on the genomic data.

“This is a great outcome,” says Amber Hartman Scholz, a microbiologist and head of the science policy department at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ-German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures. The design avoids issues that plagued other proposals, such as cumbersome regulatory requirements that many scientists feared could chill research and the use of genetic sequence information. In addition, the new mechanism is likely to generate more funds than past proposals, she says, and contribute to biodiversity conservation and the growth of the bioeconomy.

Conservation itself will need more funding, however. At the conference, nations agreed to create a special account for biodiversity conservation within the Global Environment Facility, an intergovernmental body that distributes donor funds. They also pledged to increase their total contributions to $30 billion per year by 2030. But CBD estimates meeting the new goals will require an additional $700 billion a year.

Still, Gonzalez says, protecting biodiversity now has widespread support. “I think we’re going to see a wave of action for biodiversity that will be quite different than the previous decade,” he says. Citing action by cities and commitments from large companies, he says, “I’m actually pretty optimistic.”

But the clock is ticking, Li says. “Biodiversity is what will buffer us from [natural disasters due to climate change and other] disturbances and keep our society stable and resilient,” she says. “We do not have much more time to fail again.”