Opinion: Why we have ambitious goals for COP15

Planet Earth has been called the Blue Marble: a fragile, nurturing home for all of humanity and all of its other inhabitants. When we help nature, we free nature to also care for us. Green, resilient and healthy neighbourhoods, a clean, low-carbon economy, and thriving ecosystems are the keys to sustainable life on Earth.

But nature everywhere is under siege.

This fall, the Living Planet Report 2022 from the World Wildlife Fund catalogued how global wildlife populations have declined 69 per cent since 1970, including 20 per cent in North America.

Like the canaries coal miners once used to detect deadly gases underground, our natural environment is flashing warning signs for our collective survival.

Which is why when the leaders of the G20 met last month in Bali, they called for a truly global agreement to protect and conserve the world’s biodiversity, one that matches the ambition of the breakthrough Paris Agreement.

It is an apt comparison, because the world’s climate crisis and the global biodiversity crisis are inextricably linked.

Now is the time to act on both.

Canada is currently hosting the largest United Nations Biodiversity Conference in a generation to tackle the serious challenges facing the natural world.

Called COP15 this Nature COP meeting has more than 18,000 delegates from 196 countries gathering in Montreal.

Progress cannot come fast enough. A million species are at risk of extinction. Natural ecosystems are disappearing, threatening freshwater supplies and the climate. The call to protect nature must receive the same attention as the climate.

Canada is driving progress through the greatest conservation campaign in the country’s history, fuelled by multi-billion dollar investments. The goal is to protect 30 per cent of Canada’s vast lands and three oceans by 2030. A similar process is underway in Europe, with 30 per cent of lands and seas set to be protected by the end of this decade.

Canada is also stepping up protection of key, iconic species that are important to our ecosystems, to our communities, and to who we are as Canadians: caribou, plains bisons and Monarch butterflies, to name a few.

Critically, all this work is being done while walking the path of reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples.

Together with the EU, we have ambitious goals for the biodiversity conference.

The first is to get all countries to commit to halting and reversing biodiversity loss by 2030, and to make the world nature positive by 2030.

Fundamental to achieve this, we are seeking a commitment to conserve 30 per cent of the world’s lands and oceans by 2030, which scientific research shows is the minimum necessary to address the biodiversity and climate crises. It also means restoration to make good some of the damage that has already happened.

Investing in nature brings benefits for climate, communities and economy. But protecting and restoring ecosystems is under-financed.  So our third core aim for Montreal is to mobilize additional finance, nationally and internationally, from all sources, including governments, the private sector, philanthropy and multilateral institutions. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has pledged to double EU support for international biodiversity measures to 7 billion euros from 2021-2027. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged an additional $350 million when he opened the conference this week.

Lastly, we fully subscribe to another core objective of the Convention on Biological Diversity: the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources. We need to improve the frameworks for access and benefit sharing, so important for the global south.

These goals can only be realized if everyone around the world joins us, the way the world joined together in Paris to ramp up the fight against climate change.

This Nature COP is our chance to show each other and the world that we can and will all do our part in protecting nature for a truly sustainable future for all.

Steven Guilbeault is Canada’s minister of environment and climate change. Virginijus Sinkevičius is the European  commissioner for the environment, oceans and fisheries in the European Commission.

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