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China calls on Canada for help in race to reach global biodiversity deal

#66 of 121 articles from the Special Report: Negotiating survival
China’s Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu addresses the crowd at COP15 on Dec. 15, 2022. Photo via UN Biodiversity / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

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China is tapping Canada to help overcome the toughest negotiation hurdles at the United Nations’ COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal in a diplomatic move that signals growing trust between the two countries.

In a letter sent to delegations Thursday, COP15 president and Chinese Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu announced his plan for finding agreement as countries’ environment ministers arrive in Montreal for the final rounds of negotiations.

At stake is the global biodiversity framework, an international pact for protecting nature expected to be on the scale of the Paris Agreement that countries hope to secure by the end of this weekend. Countries have been negotiating many parts of the agreement, but a handful of sticking points remain and threaten to push the talks into overtime — or collapse entirely if consensus can’t be found.

Huang’s letter to delegates says he is teaming ministers up, with gender balance, from wealthy and developing countries to lead talks with other ministers with an eye toward finalizing consultations on Saturday.

Canada’s Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault is paired with Egyptian environment minister and president of the last UN biodiversity conference, Yasmine Fouad, to lead consultations on “the key remaining issues of the global biodiversity framework,” reads the letter.

China is tapping Canada to help overcome the toughest negotiation hurdles at the United Nations’ #COP15 biodiversity conference in Montreal in a diplomatic move that signals growing trust between the two countries. #cdnpoli

That puts the two countries in a very important role as the conference hits crunch time. Essentially, the question they must answer is how to balance the ambitious goal to protect nature and stop species collapse knowing that the more ambitious the goal, the more expensive it could be to achieve. Different countries have different perspectives on how to strike this balance, and because the conference agreement is consensus-based, finding a compromise position is a must.

“Those of us who want ambition need to understand that ambition must be accompanied by resource mobilization, and those countries who want resources to be mobilized need to understand that we can only get there with ambition,” Guilbeault said Thursday. “These things go together, and this is what we need to do in the coming days: find ways we can come to an agreement on these important issues.”

Climate Action Network Canada’s climate diplomacy manager Eddy Pérez says the Egypt-Canada pairing strikes a good balance because the Egyptian minister is a seasoned diplomat who was president of the previous biodiversity conference, and that as host of COP15, Canada has wanted to play the role of broker.

“The host is present, visible, out there and optimistic,” Pérez said. “That is the message that Minister Guilbeault every day conveys. He wants to be seen as a broker, and he has the trust of the Chinese presidency.”

China wants “to say that they support an ambitious outcome and count on Canada to help land it.”

The other ministerial pairings are Rwanda and Germany, who will discuss mobilizing financial resources, and Chile and Norway, who are tasked with leading consultations on how countries could share or benefit from scientific advancements made using biodiversity within their borders.

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