Historic Biodiversity Deal Reached at the COP15 Summit in Montreal
A landmark agreement was struck on December 19th, 2022, to establish a Global Biodiversity Framework to protect and restore the natural world by over 190 countries gathered at the COP15 Summit held in Montreal, Canada. After nearly two weeks of intense negotiations, the new set of targets aims to conserve 30% of global lands and oceans and halt human-caused species extinction rates through the next decade.
While not legally enforceable like the Paris Agreement on climate change mitigation, conservation groups still hail the Kunming-Montreal deal as critical for driving coordinated worldwide efforts to reverse the precipitous decline in biodiversity by 2030. The global framework builds on an initial draft agreement first established during 2022 COP15 meetings in Montreal, Canada.
The key commitment within the agreement rests on signatory countries preserving 30% of the planet’s land and marine environments through protected areas and other conservation measures by 2030. These protected zones harbor greater levels of biodiversity compared to exploited lands. Expanding such areas provides refuge for threatened endemic species from extensive habitat loss plus overexploitation driven by human development, agriculture, overfishing, logging, and the multiplying impacts of climate change.
Currently, only 17% of terrestrial regions and less than 8% of oceans benefit from some form of conservation status globally per 2020 figures from the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Protected Planet database. The proposed target hence marks an urgently needed doubling in scale. Achieving this relies on wealthier countries adequately financing poorer states to enable designating and managing further parks, nature reserves, indigenous territories, and local community-conserved lands where biodiversity safeguarding aligns with sustainable development.
In addition to setting aside protected zones from extractive uses, the framework also promotes ecological restoration across 20% of degraded freshwater, marine and terrestrial ecosystems. These habitat rehabilitation goals intend to boost ecosystem health, resilience and carbon sequestration capacities. Example projects span reforestation of damaged rainforests, regenerating mangroves along vulnerable coastlines, reviving drained peatlands and cleaning polluted wetlands.
The deal further lays out a target of reducing herbicide, pesticide and antibiotic releases impacting nature by 50%, while also curbing plastic waste flows by minimizing their production and managing disposal sustainably. Conserving at least 90% of genetic diversity within crops and breeds is another aim, recognizing the importance of safeguarding a diverse gene pool to adapt agriculture systems under accelerating climate shifts.
On reducing human-driven extinction rates, which now hover at 100 to 1,000 times historical background levels, the agreement calls for tools to monitor and minimize the impact of productive sectors on species populations. This emphasis counters biodiversity losses from landscape conversions plus overharvesting for food, logging and other economic demands that compromise population-level stability. However, it stops short of defining specific extinction reduction numbers.
While ambitious in scope, criticisms stem from aspects of the agreement relying on voluntary national commitments for taking action rather than legally binding targets. The level of financing support from wealthier economies to realize global protections in biodiversity hotspots remains unspecified beyond existing nature funding commitments. COP15 negotiations to finalize implementation plans and monitoring will continue through 2024 until adoption at the next summit, COP16 in Turkey, when these details may firm up.
Nonetheless, faced with unrelenting pressures driving ~1 million species already threatened with extinction per an IPBES assessment, the deal marks a shifting tide in political will toward investing in ecological stability. Ultimately, healthy ecosystems underpin human health security, food and water supply reliability, climate change resilience and livelihoods for communities worldwide. The global biodiversity framework provides vital, though still incomplete, guidance for steering conservation policy and coordinated finance flows this decade toward a nature-positive, sustainable path.
