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Earth's 'combined crisis' demands common solutions, officials say

#112 of 112 articles from the Special Report: Negotiating survival

Delegates and observers in Montreal during COP15 in December 2022, in the homestretch of negotiations. Photo via UN Biodiversity/Flickr

One of the world’s leading biodiversity advocates is warning of a “combined crisis” for the planet as climate change worsens and more species go extinct. The only solution, David Cooper says, is to tackle the issues together as the world’s governments prepare for crucial upcoming international negotiations. 

Cooper, the former acting executive secretary of the UN’s Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (the group tasked with organizing biodiversity negotiations) said nature loss and climate change are deeply linked, and common solutions are required. 

“We see in recent years increasing incidents of fires, of floods, of droughts, of heat waves, and these are rightly attributed to climate change,” he told reporters on Wednesday. “But it's also related to biodiversity loss, and it's also related to ecosystem degradation.”

Cooper pointed to wildfires in Hawaii made more intense because of invasive species as one example of how nature and climate change are intertwined. That situation was akin to recent debates in Canada about the role of mountain pine beetles and this summer’s wildfires in Alberta (which scientists say were primarily caused by high temperatures and dry conditions),  or the wildfires in 2021 that charred British Columbia so badly that when an atmospheric river hit, massive flooding occurred, contributing to disastrous landslides. 

In other words, it’s all related: increasing temperatures lead to disasters that destroy habitats, and losing nature means our world is less resilient to extreme weather when it strikes.

When countries meet this October in Cali, Colombia for biodiversity negotiations, called COP16, their goal will be to slow that vicious cycle.

The previous conference (COP15) was hosted in Montreal in 2022 and saw countries agree to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework – the Paris Agreement of nature protection. The pact commits countries to protect 30 per cent of land and oceans by 2030, recognizes Indigenous leadership as a central pillar of achieving these goals and reaffirms Indigenous Peoples’ right to free, prior and informed consent to development projects taking place on their territories. It also includes a call for rich countries to support poorer countries with US$200 billion to protect nature by 2030.

Environment and Climate Change Minister Steven Guilbeault said COP15 was about countries agreeing about what needed to be done, while COP16 is about how to implement the agreement.

“In the last two years we've done a lot of work, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done,” Guilbeault said. As a planet, “species are still going extinct, we're still unsustainably using natural resources, we're not protecting critical habitats and we've still not collectively realized that in the fight against climate change, our biggest ally is nature.”

“We see in recent years increasing incidents of fires, of floods, of droughts, of heat waves, and these are rightly attributed to climate change... But it's also related to biodiversity loss, and it's also related to ecosystem degradation.”

Guilbeault said a major change in how Canada tackles conservation in recent years involves partnering with Indigenous nations; “almost 100 per cent” of new conservation projects are partnerships with nations. 

“In fact we're finalizing what, to our knowledge, is the world's largest Indigenous-led conservation project, in the Northwest Territories of Canada,” he said. “When finalized, and I'm confident we'll get there before COP16, it will be roughly 1 million square kilometers –– four times the size of the United Kingdom.”

Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said her goal for COP16 is nothing short of making nature protection “as relevant politically” as climate change is. 

She said she doesn’t believe world governments have sufficiently appreciated the interconnectedness of nature and climate change.

“If we invest a lot in this process of nature recovery, but at the same time we are not decarbonizing, the climate will continue changing and nature will not have the time to adapt,” she said. “If nature collapses, communities and people will also collapse. Society will collapse.”

COP16 is the first of three major environment and climate negotiations scheduled for this fall. It is scheduled to run from Oct. 21 to Nov. 1. 

The UN negotiations for climate change, called COP29, will be hosted in Baku, Azerbaijan from Nov. 11 to Nov. 21.

The fifth and final negotiating round for a global plastics treaty will be hosted in Busan, South Korea from Nov. 25 to Dec. 1.

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