In an essay entitled The Sense of Wonder, the American conservationist Rachel Carson suggested two questions to make us think more deeply about our natural environment. “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”
Published in 1955, Carson’s call to mindfulness was influential in the burgeoning postwar environmental movement. But despite campaigners’ best efforts, the sense of jeopardy lurking within her second question is now acute. Wild animal populations are declining annually by about 2.5% as a result of habitat loss, invasive species, pollution, climate change, overfishing and overhunting. Since 1970, overall numbers are down by 69%. Livestock and the human beings who farm them now account for 96% of all the mammals on Earth. The Sumatran tiger, the Bornean orangutan and the hellbender salamander are among the million animal and plant species judged perilously close to extinction.
In Canada this week, conservationists will attempt to persuade the world’s governments to summon up the will to address this crisis. Like the climate emergency, it is the direct consequence of human activity, but has nothing like the same high profile. The Montreal Cop15 summit – which begins on Wednesday – is part of the wider Cop process launched in 1992, when the United Nations established three separate conventions on climate change, biodiversity and desertification. But since then, despite 196 nations signing up for action, the record on biodiversity has been one of lamentable failure. Of 20 targets set at the last major summit in Japan in 2010 – ranging from tackling pollution to protecting coral reefs – none were fully met. In the recent words of Andrew Terry, the director of conservation at the Zoological Society of London, “absolutely no progress has been made” in slowing the rate of species attrition.
There is no coming back from extinction, so Montreal is an opportunity that the planet cannot afford to miss. But a paradigm shift is required to make progress. For too long, governments have treated biodiversity as a secondary and separate issue, focusing their energy on global heating. In reality, as images of polar bears on shrinking ice illustrate, the two crises overlap. The ecosystems that sustain natural variety also help regulate the climate. The forests, coral reefs and mangroves of the world, which provide a home to a dazzling array of species, capture carbon that would otherwise contribute to rising temperatures. Rapacious economic activity and environmental indifference is thus destroying natural equilibriums that protect us too. To exit this doom loop, a global conservation and restoration project is urgently required.
This, in theory, will be the aim of a post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework to be discussed in Montreal. Draft targets include the protection of 30% of the world’s land and sea from unsustainable exploitation, and a crackdown on pesticides, plastic waste and invasive species. Businesses may be asked to produce biodiversity impact assessments and plans for mitigation. Richer countries will be pushed to finance biodiversity conservation in the global south.
A breakthrough is desperately needed. In Paris in 2015, a legally binding treaty committed the world’s nations to action to tackle the climate crisis. Something similar is required in Montreal. But a roadmap will not be worth much if governments do not accept that investing to protect the world’s biodiversity is not an optional extra. Disappointingly, no heads of state are expected to attend this week’s summit – in stark contrast to the Cop27 climate talks in Egypt last month. That is not good enough. Our human fate is ultimately bound up with nature and the countless species hurtling towards extinction. Recognising that has become an existential necessity.
