Talks to halt the destruction of nature “very much hang in the balance”, sources have said, as environment ministers from around the world begin to arrive in Montreal amid concerns about a lack of Chinese leadership of the Cop15 talks.
At the halfway stage of the summit in Canada, negotiators at the UN biodiversity summit have said divisions are contributing to the growing risk of a “Copenhagen moment”, referring to the 2009 UN climate summit when talks ended with a weak final agreement in the Danish capital, not the “Paris moment for nature” leading environmental figures had been calling for.
Over the next two days, environment ministers from more than 100 countries will arrive in Canada to finish the text – known as the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. Senior UN figures have called for a renewed sense of urgency as negotiations enter the final stretch, praising China’s leadership of Cop15, which is the first time Beijing has led on a major political UN environmental agreement.
But, privately, governments, activists and NGOs have expressed deep concern about the state of talks, with entrenched positions from the EU, the Africa group and Latin American countries raising the likelihood of a standoff in the final week of Cop15. They say the disagreement has been confounded by “a leadership vacuum” from China in negotiations, with the country often playing a ceremonial role in talks. The Cop15 presidency is understood to be reaching out to NGOs and governments about how to resolve differences.
Proposals to protect 30% of Earth and issues of money and digital biopiracy are understood to be the main sticking points between countries, with fears that they are ducking tackling the key drivers of biodiversity loss such as overconsumption, pesticides and intensive agriculture, and businesses disclosing the impact of their activities on the natural world.
Negotiations are responding to scientific warnings that 1 million species are at risk of extinction, while the architects of the Paris agreement have said a positive outcome in Montreal is key to limiting global heating to 1.5C.
“I’m always optimistic that they will get it sorted out but it’s so chaotic at the moment and so finely poised between complete failure and success that it is going to come down to what ministers decide,” said one negotiator on Tuesday.
“China might be furiously working away in the background. Nobody has a perfect view. But from where I’m sitting, I don’t see them providing leadership or even opinions in most of the negotiations. Everyone’s concerned with where it’s going. At the moment the final text is quite likely to be a bad deal – but not so bad that a country could turn it down – so we’ll kick the can down the road to the next Cop in two years,” they added.
“Too many issues remain on the table for ministers to be able to make sensible decisions. There’s global willingness to try to reduce those quickly but there’s a sense that talks very much hang in the balance,” said one source with knowledge of the talks.
Huang Runqiu, China’s environment minister and the president of Cop15, has been hesitant to speak to international media. So far, Justin Trudeau is the only world leader who has spoken at Cop15. More than 150 scientists this week backed a call by the UK conservationist Chris Packham for the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, to attend the biodiversity summit.
Carlos Manuel Rodríguez, a former Costa Rican environment minister and the head of the Global Environment Facility, the main fund for supporting biodiversity action in developing countries, said the talks were tense.
“I have never seen such a tense, aggressive environment. It used to be very different,” he said. “This is the downside of the success of making this Cop politically relevant. It used to be irrelevant, politically speaking, but it was not until the pandemic came and we began to negotiate a new framework that we saw that biodiversity loss and climate change is a product of the same problem.”
Environmental groups are calling for the Chinese presidency to show leadership in Montreal and bring countries together to resolve key issues.
“So far the talks at Cop15 are stuck on the usual major topics. The Chinese presidency must provide clarity on how it wants to organise the process during the last week, and especially how it wants to make use of the ministers who will arrive. Will they be tasked to find compromise on key issues, or will they only be used for talk shops?” said Oscar Soria, the campaign director of the activism organisation Avaaz.
“There is an incredible leadership vacuum here, if it continues like this we will soon have to say a definite goodbye to ambition. This is maybe what the world powerhouses, including China, actually want,” he said.
Li Shuo, a policy adviser for Greenpeace China who has been following the biodiversity negotiations closely, said China should begin inviting ministers to resolve key issues in Montreal as soon as possible.
“A clear roadmap is needed for the second week of the biodiversity talks in Montreal. Ministers are not currently expected to engage with the negotiations. This has to change. Their leadership is needed immediately after arrival. The [Cop15] presidency needs to start building trust and joint ownership of the outcome,” he said.
