COP16: The global failure to protect life

04 November 2024

At the end of ten days of negotiations, during the participating states were expected to implement practical measures to halt the collapse of biodiversity, COP16 ended without even resolving the two main points on the agenda. Two years after the Kunming-Montreal Framework, which set international targets to protect 30% of land and sea by 2030, no follow-up plan or funding to implement these commitments has been forthcoming. This reflects leaders’ dreadful inability to join together to defeat the greatest threat facing humanity.   

Colombia hosted the 16th United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16) from 21 October to 1 November 2024, with the aim of combating the global collapse of biodiversity, at a time at which the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity (IPBES) is warning that ecosystems are declining “at a rate unprecedented in human history”, and when almost a million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction.  

In the face of the climate crisis that is hitting us so hard, at a time at which Valencia is counting its dead after unprecedentedly violent floods and at which the IPCC is reminding us that protecting ecosystems is a vital emergency if we are to cope with climate breakdown, this COP represented an historic opportunity to put scientific recommendations into practice. Two years after signing the Kunming-Montreal Framework Agreement at COP15, which provides for the protection of 30% of land and sea by 2030, states were expected to set out practical ways of protecting our ecosystems.   

However, after ten days of negotiations, the COP ended without the states having reached a decision on the two main issues on the agenda, namely the financial strategy and the monitoring framework for implementing nature protection.   

Faced with the collapse of biodiversity, the leaders are nowhere to be found  

At the end of the COP, just as the negotiations were finally reaching the key issues, the talks had to be brought to a halt. The reason: half of the participating countries had already left for the airport to catch their return flights. Noting that there was no longer a quorum, CBD spokesman David Ainsworth announced that “the countries will have to continue the negotiations next year at an interim meeting in Bangkok”, thus postponing and officially suspending the formal closure of the work until a later date.   

“We really question the lack of legitimacy of discussing such an important issue at the end of the COP”, said Brazilian negotiator Maria Angelica Ikeda, shortly before discussions on mobilising financial resources came to a halt. The Burkina Faso representative, Moumouni Ouedraogo, added: “At the end of this COP, there is a lingering sense of unfinished business”.   

No specific plan to halt the destruction of life  

In 2022, the developed countries, which bear a major responsibility for the destruction of biodiversity, agreed to devote $20 billion a year from 2025 and then $30 billion from 2030 onwards to fund nature protection. But far from achieving this target, eight governments have stated that they will allocate a total of $163 million (around €150 million) to the Global Environment Facility (GEF), which is less than 1% of what had been announced! France’s contribution is €5 million, five times less than its European neighbours the UK and Germany. The GEF declared from the COP sidelines that it had a total of $396 million available, while the estimated resources needed for protection amount to $200 billion from all sources. Against this backdrop, and despite the fact that financing was one of the major issues to be addressed, no strategy was defined for raising the $200 billion needed for nature conservation.   

Jiwoh Abdulai, Sierra Leone’s Minister for the Environment and Climate Change, was quick to denounce this resounding failure: “Governments have shown time and time again that they can provide the necessary funds when they want to – whether for pandemics or wars. So why can’t they make this work in order to combat the greatest existential threat we face?”  

Of the 196 states party to the CBD, only 44 have drawn up a national plan to halt the loss of biodiversity. And in any case, drawing up a national plan provides no guarantee of real protection for ecosystems. The case of France, a champion of environmental hypocrisy, illustrates this perfectly. While it claims to have already achieved the 30% target for protection of its waters, the reality is quite different: only 0.094% of the Mediterranean coastline and 0.005% of the Atlantic-Channel-North Sea coastline are truly protected. And with good reason: industrial fisheries carry out nearly half of their operations in France’s so-called ‘protected’ marine areas.  

Unable to challenge this deadly status quo, the states have failed to define the notion of ‘protection’ that they had included in their targets two years earlier. In other words, to date there are no binding international measures to impose restrictions on the industrial operators who are causing unprecedented damage to biodiversity, at a time at which less than 3% of the world’s oceans are truly protected, and at which more than 80% of Europe’s ‘protected’ marine areas do not regulate any industrial activity.   

Although it was billed as “the implementation COP” this COP ends without any plan on how the targets of protecting 30% of land and marine ecosystems by 2030 will be met.    

France’s special responsibility   

With the world’s second-largest maritime area and the largest in biodiversity negotiations, and with the United States having failed to ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), France must set an example in the protection of its waters and align itself with the international framework for nature protection, starting with a ban on all industrial activities and infrastructure in its protected areas.   

With the climate COP29 set to open on Monday 11 November in Baku, Azerbaijan, and leading climatologists warning that “we are on the brink of an irreversible climate catastrophe”, there is still time for France to show that it recognises the urgency of the climate and the environment, and to show the ambition needed to bring about the “ambitious and transformative changes” that the scientific community is constantly calling for.   

Going further  

Far from gauging the urgency of the situation, the states have only gone as far as adopting a text which, after eight years of negotiations, merely specifies the procedures for defining ‘Ecologically or Biologically Significant Marine Areas’ (EBSAs). This does not however imply any level of protection or any restriction on the activities that can take place there. However, the scientific consensus and the international recommendations of the IUCN areunequivocal: a marine area is considered ‘protected’ if infrastructure and industrial activities, particularly industrial fishing, are prohibited. But contrary to these very practical recommendations, Le Monde journalist Stéphane Foucart laments that “the COPs follow one after the other, setting targets with the aim of announcing rather than pursuing them, and evolving in a sort of parallel universe”.     

In the face of government inaction, some 30 ocean scientists published a study a few weeks ago redefining the criteria for sustainable fishing, which is the only way to halt and reverse the decline in marine biodiversity and the food insecurity caused by overfishing. In it, they propose 11 ‘golden rules’ based on a clear vision: each fish caught must generate maximum value to society while minimising its ecological impact. We are a long way from that today. Our governments continue to subsidise industrial vessels, which destroy economic, social and environmental value, allowing these same ships to operate in the marine protected areas and coastal waters of countries in which fish is an essential food resource. This is often done without any controls or transparency requirements, at a time at which the fishing industry is regularly involved in corruption, regulatory breaches and almost systematic violations of human rights at sea.