Countries adopt insufficient global conservation targets for 2030

Late last year, leaders from around the world gathered in Montreal to finalize a global conservation plan from now to 2030. The meeting took place against the backdrop of a biodiversity crisis that threatens a million species with extinction and the foundational building blocks of human society. While some Parties pushed for a plan that would compel the kind of transformative change necessary to disrupt the drivers of biodiversity loss, the final, consensus-driven agreement made it more difficult for countries and communities to address the biodiversity crisis. By accepting insufficient targets for action between now and 2030, the agreement allows countries to continue business as usual, posing an existential threat to human well-being.

The Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD or the Convention) started negotiating conservation goals and targets in 2019. Their work included numerous negotiating sessions over the course of three years, as well as meetings of high-level delegates and Ministers at the fifteenth UN Biodiversity Conference that took place in October 2021 in Kunming, China, and December 2022 in Montreal, Canada. The resulting Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KM-GBF) provides a conservation roadmap for the 196 Parties to the Convention. The framework identifies four long-term goals centered on the Convention’s 2050 vision for biodiversity, when Parties are supposed to be “living in harmony with nature,” and 23 “global targets for urgent action over the decade to 2030.”

No transformational change in Montreal

At the opening of the meeting in Montreal, UN Secretary-General António Guterres laid out the challenge. He was characteristically blunt, noting that “[m]ultinational corporations are filling their bank accounts while emptying our world of its natural gifts” and that “[e]cosystems have become playthings of profit.” As a result of “our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction. We are treating nature like a toilet. And ultimately, we are committing suicide by proxy.” The secretary-general was not exaggerating. In a “60 Minutes” story  on the biodiversity crisis, Dr. Paul Ehrlich sounded the alarm that countries are not doing enough to avert “the end of the kind of civilization we’re used to.”

Unfortunately, the KM-GBF may prove Ehrlich right, at least in the context of global multilateral environmental agreements. In Montreal, Parties consistently refused to agree on targets that would compel transformative change—a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic, and social factors, including paradigms, goals, and values—and disrupt the negative trends in nature.

Disappointing funding commitments

According to a 2020 report from the Paulson Institute, to halt and reverse declines in biodiversity we need to increase global spending on protection and restoration by an average of $711 billion each year this decade. During negotiations, many Parties from the Global South were clear that they cannot meet the KM-GBF targets without additional resources. These Parties even walked out of one negotiation session when wealthy countries signaled their refusal to compensate for the environmental degradation and destruction they cause. Nonetheless, the Parties declined to set a target that would close the financing gap. Instead, KM-GBF Target 19 would “[s]ubstantially and progressively increase the level of financial resources” to “at least 200 billion United States dollars” by 2030. The result was well short of what is necessary and is hardly transformative.