The term “biodiversity”, a contraction of “biological diversity”, was coined in the late 1980s – just when it was becoming clear that human impacts were erasing the myriad variety of life on Earth at an alarming rate. As the Joni Mitchell song says, “you don’t know what you’ve got ‘till it’s gone.”
When the influential biologist EO Wilson used the word as the title of a book he edited in 1988, it entered the conservation science mainstream. Wilson had already devised the term “biophilia” to describe an intense human love for nature, which he hoped was universal. He linked this explicitly to the pleasure we take in variety. He argued that, as infants, we “concentrate happily on other organisms ... novelty and diversity are particularly esteemed.”
This certainly captures the experience of those of us who are innately drawn into a passionate fascination with other species. But it is sadly clear that this fascination is not sufficiently widespread to halt the slide towards mass extinctions.
Perhaps mindful of this, Wilson’s essay collection gave substantial space to demonstrating biodiversity’s value to all humanity, to showing that our very survival depends on protecting – and now restoring – the ecosystems that sustain the diversity of life. “Biodiversity”, therefore, has contained from the outset a much stronger appeal to our self-interest than “nature”, the rather more attractive word that it has, in several ways, supplanted.
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The UN Environment Programme seized on the term almost immediately, and focused on this human-centred emphasis, linking biodiversity to sustainability: “the Earth’s biological resources are vital to humanity’s economic and social development”. This linkage had enough momentum to ensure biodiversity advocates a prominent place at the historic Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. The outcome, alongside the much better known UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, was the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), whose 15th Conference of the Parties (Cop15) opens in Montreal on December 7th.
There are very high hopes riding on making this meeting a “Paris moment” for biodiversity, with an agreement comparable to the one reached at the ground-breaking climate conference in the French capital in 2015. The Montreal discussions come 12 years after the last high profile CBD Cop, in Japan, which set the ambitious “Aichi targets” for the past decade. The Montreal meeting is particularly important because it is mandated to set the global biodiversity agenda for the coming 10 years.
If science and conservation practice were all that counted, the arguments for treating biodiversity as a front-rank global issue have grown ever stronger over the past decade. The CBD was long considered the poor relation of the climate agenda. But the evidence that flourishing biodiversity, and the healthy ecosystems essential to that flourishing, are key elements in mitigating the climate crisis has become much clearer in recent years. It’s now widely understood that degraded landscapes emit greenhouse gases, and that biodiverse landscapes, whether peatlands, forests or grasslands, sequester them. Conversely, climate change is itself a major factor in accelerating the biodiversity collapse.
At the recent Cop27 climate conference in Egypt, the architects of the Paris agreement highlighted the contribution of nature-based solutions to alleviating the climate crisis: “There is no pathway to limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees without taking action on protecting and restoring nature,” they said. “And as with climate change, it is the most vulnerable communities who bear the greatest impacts of biodiversity loss.”
The relatively new lens of natural capital accounting has also done much in recent years to bring into focus the range of vital values in thriving ecosystems, which conventional economics has, disastrously, usually ignored. This approach has been embraced in the UN’s System of Environmental Economic Accounting. This system demonstrates biodiversity’s contribution to economic and social development in irrefutable detail. Similarly, ideas that were once dismissed as nebulous, like the ways in which biodiverse “green” elements in our environment benefit physical and mental health, are now widely accepted.
Meanwhile, ecological restoration – with its hopeful message that we have developed the skills to heal many of the wounds we have inflicted on nature, given appropriate investment – has moved from the margins to the centre as a key conservation strategy. Indeed, the UN has declared the 2020s the “Decade on Ecosystem Restoration”.
But despite all these encouraging developments, the Montreal meeting opens under several dark clouds. It has been delayed for two years due to the pandemic. The official host country, China, has displayed very little dynamic leadership in preparing the event; the conference has finally been shifted to Canada due to Beijing’s Covid restrictions. But China remains the formal host, and its decision not to invite heads of state risks downgrading the event, especially in the wake of the markedly presidential climate Cop27. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine makes it harder to focus the international community on the biodiversity crisis. On a different level, it doesn’t help that COP15 coincides with the World Cup.
Above all, a review of the Aichi targets in 2020 starkly revealed the great gulf between aspiration and achievement by the signatories to the CBD, including Ireland. Not one of the targets has been reached. There has been progress on some, with significant increases in protected areas, for example. But the overall picture remains one of rapidly collapsing global biodiversity, with key insect populations vanishing and two of five plants at risk of extinction.
Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the CBD, who spoke at Ireland’s National Biodiversity Conference in June, summarised that review: “Earth’s living systems as a whole are being compromised.” Her deputy, David Cooper, noted national policies still point in the wrong direction: “We are still seeing so much more public money invested in things that harm biodiversity than in things that support biodiversity.”
Eliminating $500 billion per year of these “perverse subsidies”, whether to unsustainable agriculture, which severely degrades 40 per cent of the world’s land, or to toxic industries, is one of the most ambitious of 20 targets set out in the draft framework for the next decade.
Another target will be at least equally contentious and reveals the rift between developed and developing worlds so evident at Cop27. This concerns sharing benefits of digitising genetic sequence information, where high-tech countries and corporations synthesise medically useful elements from wild plants and animals, very often sourced in poor countries. The Africa group has made agreement on this issue a condition of support for all other elements of any deal.
A third key target is ‘30x30′, aiming to protect 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030, though there are fears that indigenous rights might be undermined unless there is appropriate consultation on this measure on the ground.
The targets are certainly commendable, indeed essential, but one has to wonder how, even if they are agreed, they can be implemented. As we know all too well in Ireland, the multiple layers of protection our biodiversity already enjoys on paper have done little to halt its decline.
The same politicians and policymakers who laud our “green” credentials at convenient moments fail to enforce our existing biodiversity protection laws. Some of our most precious ecosystems, like Killarney’s oak forests, remain degraded by invasive species, even on State-owned land. Our governments actually promote biodiversity loss by intensifying agriculture. Indeed, the Department of Agriculture has just imposed an agri-environmental scheme that undermines the biodiversity elements in our most successful farming and conservation initiative, the Burren Programme.
So while it’s critically important for our future that Cop15 meets the challenge of agreeing the proposed framework, translating it into our landscapes will be a greater challenge still.
We asked three leading Irish biodiversity advocates three questions:
1. Why is biodiversity important?
2. What is the most important decision COP15 could take?
3. What is the most important change Ireland could make to support that decision?
Deirdre Lynn, Scientific Officer at NPWS, Joint Head of Irish team at COP 15
1. Biodiversity is life. What is more important than life?
2. The decision to adopt an ambitious global biodiversity framework that can quantify progress towards halting biodiversity loss.
3. To recognise the step-change required to escalate restoration efforts.
Pádraic Fogarty, Irish Wildlife Trust delegate at COP15
1. Biodiversity is our life support system, humans can’t survive in a world with collapsed ecosystems.
2. An agreement to protect 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030 could be very significant if it is done fairly, ie where local/indigenous peoples are central.
3. Ireland could sign up to protecting 30 per cent of our land by 2030 (we’ve already signed up to the marine part), starting with land in public ownership.
Jane Stout, VP for Biodiversity and Climate Action, TCD
1. Diverse populations, species and habitats make ecosystems resilient, which means that they can continue to function and provide essential goods and services in the face of environmental, economic and sociopolitical change.
2. Cop15 could commit to putting nature at the heart of everything we do, and enable consideration of nature in every decision we make as nations, organisations, communities and individuals.
3. Move biodiversity up the political agenda and put nature in a central government department like the Taoiseach’s; properly incentivise restoration of woodlands, wetlands and other important ecosystems; frame nature as the solution not as the problem in societal discourse.