COP15: Nations come to a historic environmental deal

In a historic deal to preserve biodiversity, nations have agreed to protect one-third of the planet for nature by 2030.

There will also be targets for protecting vital ecosystems such as rainforests and wetlands and indigenous peoples’ rights.

The agreement was reach early Monday morning at the COP15 UN biodiversity summit in Montreal, Canada.

Because of Covid, the summit was move from China and postponed.

Despite a last-minute objection from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, China, still in charge of the meeting, brought down the gavel on the agreement.

The following are the agreement’s main tenets:

• Maintaining, improving, and restoring ecosystems, halting extinction, and preserving genetic diversity.
• Making sure that species and habitats can continue to offer the critical services they do for humanity, such as food and clean water, is what is meant by sustainable use of biodiversity.
• Ensuring that indigenous peoples' rights are upheld and that the advantages of natural resources, such as plant-based medicines, are distributed equally and fairly
• Biodiversity funding and resource allocation: Ensuring that funds and conservation efforts are direct where they are most needed.

It had been thought that the meeting in Montreal represent the last chance to restart nature. There was disagreement on the proposal’s viability and the degree of ambition throughout the discussions.

A key point of dispute was how to pay for conservation initiatives in areas of the world that are home to some of the most incredible biodiversity.

The term “biodiversity” refers to the variety of living things on Earth and how they interact to build a complex web of life that sustains the planet.

China, also known as COP 15, the summit’s former president, released a revised version of the agreement’s language on Sunday. It had to be transport to Canada because of Covid laws in China.

After several hours of delays, delegates assembled the summit’s full session early on Monday morning, but they promptly agreed to the wording.

Despite objections from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which stated that it could not support the agreement, Minister Huang Runqui, the president of COP 15, slammed the gavel to end the meeting.

According to Georgina Chandler, senior international policy advisor for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the agreement reached in Montreal should benefit both people and the environment. 

Governments, businesses, and communities now need to determine how they will assist in making these pledges a reality. 

According to Sue Lieberman of the Wildlife Conservation Society, the agreement was a compromise that could have gone further to transform our relationship with nature and stop our destruction of ecosystems, habitats, and species, even though it contained several good and hard-won elements.

Following days of difficult negotiations, a deal was reach. Ministers delivered fervent statements on Saturday about the necessity of reaching a consensus on specific objectives to put nature on a path to recovery by the end of the decade.

Our vessel is nature. We must keep it floating, Virginijus Sinkevicius, EU Commissioner for Environment, Oceans, and Fisheries.

The Colombian environment minister, Susana Muhamed, was applaud for her call for comprehensive environmental protection for the good of all. Nature has no limits, she declared.

Scientists have cautioned that people are putting the Earth beyond its acceptable limits by causing record rates of forest and grassland loss and ocean pollution.

Increased exposure to diseases such as SARs CoV-2, Ebola, and HIV from wild animals is one consequence.

The topic of money has been the main problem. Some nations have been advocating for the establishment of a new fund to support the preservation of biodiversity, echoing the COP 27 climate summit in Egypt, but others have rejected this.