Biodiversity loss reflects global failure
THE tsunami of news about the just-concluded US presidential elections has deflected international attention from the ever-worsening global ecological crisis and the diminishing multilateral efforts to tackle its various dimensions before it’s too late. The 16th Conference of Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was held from October 21 to November 1 at Cali, Colombia. It was a prelude to the 29th COP of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change being convened at Baku, Azerbaijan, from November 11 to 22.
Development will come to a dead end if ecological sustainability becomes a largely semantic pursuit.
Biodiversity and climate change are intimately interlinked domains, with strong feedback loops. The relentless destruction of forests, in particular rainforests, across the world, progressively shrinks one of the most important carbon sinks for absorbing atmospheric greenhouse gases and reducing global warming. The loss of habitat for wild animal and plant species in the denuded forests reduces biodiversity and brings the surviving species in close contact with human and domesticated mammal populations, exposing the latter to unfamiliar and highly infectious strains of viruses. This is what happened during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The world’s oceans are the other major carbon sink, absorbing greenhouse gases in the same manner as forests do and moderating atmospheric temperatures. But the sea has become the world’s rubbish dump. All manner of hazardous and toxic waste is thrown into the sea. The dumping of non-degradable plastics into oceans has created vast floating islands of plastic waste in several oceanic zones. The chemistry of seawater is changing, as are its thermal parameters. Marine life is being adversely impacted, and the oceans are estimated to be absorbing 30 per cent less carbon emissions than during the last millennium. From these two instances, one can clearly discern how biodiversity loss is accentuating global warming. They need to be dealt with in tandem. A single global convention on ecology, explicitly recognising the integral link between biodiversity and climate change, has become an urgent necessity.
COP16 was the first to be held after the landmark COP15, which led to the adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) in 2022. Among its major targets were the setting up of protected terrestrial, inland water and marine zones to reach over 30 per cent of such zones globally by 2030. The GBF also aims to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. It was agreed that developed countries would channel $20 billion to developing nations by 2025 to enable them to meet their biodiversity targets. This figure would go up to $30 billion by 2030.
The Colombian hosts declared the setting up of the Cali Fund under the COP to handle biodiversity finance, but so far only $396 million have been pledged.
The GBF contains a landmark decision on the equitable sharing of benefits from the utilisation of genetic resources and digital sequence information, and of traditional knowledge associated with genetic resources. It is well known that multinational companies from the Global North have been looting genetic resources of developing tropical countries to make pharmaceutical products, agri-business items and other goods from the sale of which huge profits are made. The source countries of such genetic resources get no share of these profits. Western countries want such genetic material to be “open source”, claiming that this promotes innovation and lower prices of products, which are in the nature of global public goods. But the same argument is rejected when it comes to industrial products and technology, where intellectual property rights are considered sacrosanct.
At COP15, the principle of benefit-sharing from the use of genetic resources was conceded, but the mechanism for implementing it was left to be worked out by COP16. However, the decision adopted practically eviscerates the sharing principle. The reported text says: “… entities which on their balance sheet dates exceed at least two out of three of these thresholds (total assets: $20 million; sales: $50m; profits: $5m), averaged over three years, should contribute to the global fund 1 per cent of their profits or 0.1 per cent of their revenue as an indicative rate.” The contribution is not mandatory, only exhortatory. The rates are only ‘indicative’.
Nithin Ramachandran of the Geneva-based Third World Network commented: “The decision is giving bio-pirates a chance to make a one-time donation to the Cali Fund and get away with it.”
The developed countries insisted that in view of the decision on sharing of benefits from genetic resources, there should not be domestic laws regulating this domain. This would have meant the legitimised loot of genetic resources for the payment of paltry sums into the proposed global fund. This was strongly resisted by India and other developing countries and eventually dropped.
COP15 had directed that the states party to the CBD would submit National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans at COP16. These would indicate how countries proposed to deliver on various goals and targets set out in the GBF adopted at COP15 and what progress they had already achieved against its parameters. In fact, only 44 of the 196 countries that are party to the CBD had made their submissions by the end of the conference, including India.
The perennial challenge is the inability of the world to mobilise massive resources required to tackle the climate and biodiversity issues which confront our fragile planet. With Trump in the White House, it is even less likely that the ecological crisis will receive the attention it deserves. He is set to loosen the regulatory restraints on fossil fuel exploration and production even in ecologically sensitive areas. With the world’s largest economy and its front-ranking scientific and technological power opting out, the rest of the world is unlikely to step up to the plate.
India has made an impressive submission to COP16 on its national strategy to deliver on the commitments made at COP15, but the practical record is of often sacrificing ecological integrity in a mistaken trade-off with ‘development’. Development will come to a dead end if ecological sustainability becomes a largely semantic pursuit.
