Ahead of talks in Rome, analysis by Carbon Brief and the Guardian found that more than half the world’s countries have no plans to protect 30% of land and sea for nature, despite committing to a global agreement to do so in 2022. It is the headline target for this year’s agreement. If large, biodiverse countries like Mexico, Indonesia, Malaysia, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa and Venezuela do not implement it, the global target will not be met.
Subsidies that drive global heating and destroy nature have continued to rise despite a target to reform $500bn of the most harmful by the end of the decade, according to a report by Earth Track last year. Only Brazil and the EU were showing signs of action, according to the researchers.
Both are issues that predate Trump and the recent change in geopolitical winds on the environment.
Meanwhile, scientific indicators continue to worsen. Global wildlife populations have plunged by an average of 73% in 50 years, according to the latest Living Planet Index. We will get a better idea of progress on other targets at Cop17 next year, but some environment ministers are increasingly speaking up about the lack of progress.
Asked whether enough was being done to reach the overarching ambition of halting nature loss by 2030 by my colleague Phoebe Weston in Rome, Madagascar’s environment minister Max Fontaine painted a bleak picture.
“Honestly, it’s almost impossible when you see the trends of where things are going,” he said. “We are not going in the right direction, we all need to strengthen efforts.”
Jean-Luc Crucke, Belgium’s climate and ecological transition minister described the Cop negotiations as the “least bad” process. If we really want to save nature, he said, “there is no other solution than this one”. But questions are being raised about its relevance. Ahead of the Rome summit, there were concerns that not enough countries would turn up at the UN nature summit for negotiators to make binding decisions.
Of course, there have been some small victories. In Cali, governments reached an agreement to encourage companies to share commercial profits from discoveries using genetic data from nature through the creation of a voluntary fund, which was launched in Rome. We will have to wait and see how much money the new fund ends up generating. Countries also formally recognised Indigenous communities in the global decision making process on biodiversity.
It is not over until it is over. But if there is another decade of missed targets on nature, harder questions will be asked about the utility of negotiating international agreements that countries have no apparent ability or will meet.
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