Sophie Lawrence, Greenbank Stewardship and Engagement Lead, Rathbone Greenbank Investments, assesses the success of the COP15 bio-diversity conference.
To have reached an agreement at COP15 between more than 190 parties is a success in itself, before the specific goals and targets are scrutinised. Throughout the whole conference there had been serious concerns raised by participants that an agreement wouldn’t get across the line.
COP fatigue, the time of year, “biodiversity burnout” and a lack of world leader presence or media coverage all contributed to this, as well as the sheer volume of working groups and different components to the conference’s negotiating process.
Overall, the agreement looks promising:
- the difficult question of resource mobilisation has partly been solved for with a commitment to add $30bn by 2030 to the Global Environment Facility (GEF) to fund biodiversity;
- centring Indigenous rights in the global response to biodiversity loss importantly gets several mentions in the text;
- what became the flagship goal of conserving 30% of the world’s land and oceans remains in.
However, significant concerns remain over the scale of finance committed by developed countries to developing nations given the scale of the problem, in addition to questions over whether the GEF is an effective mechanism for distributing funds equitably.
From a finance perspective, it seems the finance sector’s unprecedented involvement in the negotiating process for COP15 as well as the conference itself has been successful in part. It is welcome to see, in target 14, mentions of “private financial flows” needing to be aligned with the goals and targets of the global biodiversity framework, alongside public finance.
Although mandatory reporting on impacts and dependencies on biodiversity was watered down in the final text to “large and transnational companies”, with no mention of mandatory but just a need to “disclose”, this could already lead to a significant change in business practices, if fully implemented. The final text also acknowledges the important role private finance will play in plugging the funding gap for nature recovery.
The hope is that this framework will be ratcheted up over time and monitored more closely than previous global biodiversity targets.
We simply can’t afford for these targets to fail in the same way as the previous global biodiversity targets did given the current trends of biodiversity loss and the vitally important role nature plays in underpinning our livelihoods, economy and health.
