Genetic resources emerging as make-or-break issue at Cop15

As Cop15 biodiversity conference enters its final days, a stocktaking meeting at the weekend in Montreal highlighted a large number of unresolved issues threatening to block a strong outcome.

The plenary meeting attended by negotiation teams representing more than 190 countries in Montreal acknowledged considerable progress but also indicated there are still many areas of disagreement, jeopardising hopes of reaching a significant new global biodiversity framework (GBF).

It is hoped a high-level political meeting of ministers later this week will help to overcome these issues and create momentum needed to ensure a breakthrough.

Too many items are unresolved despite delegates working day and night, said observer Dr Elsa Tsioumani at an Earth Negotiations Bulletin briefing. “The work to be done is indeed overwhelming.”

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It required agreement on funding issues, political compromises and sign-off on technical issues, she added.

There is an absence of significant commitments on resource mobilisation to halt biodiversity loss and to restore nature; implementation mechanisms and benefit-sharing from the use of digital sequence information (DSI) on genetic resources, she confirmed.

This relates to access to, and the fair and equitable sharing of, the benefits arising from genetic resources. The EU has called for legal certainty and clarity, while generating more benefits than costs.

It is emerging as a make-or-break issue and is a space where business and commercial interests are prominent, notably around control, access and wealth sharing from genetic data, ie breakthroughs in modern medicine, technology and food.

A new version of the global biodiversity framework text will be issued in the coming days. Countries including the EU members, US, Australia, Japan and Mexico want tougher rules, while 20 countries that harbour 70 per cent of the Earth’s biodiverse areas including Brazil, India, China, Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo say finance flows must match targets, warning that a proposal for an annual $10 billion is “far from adequate”.

It is understood progress on protecting land is being made, compared to protecting the sea and oceans in a difficult scenario where marine protected areas are scarce.

On a more positive note, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) on Sunday published its first “restoration barometer report”, documenting investments of $26bn from public and private sources across 18 countries restoring 14 million hectares of degraded landscapes – an area the size of Greece.

The report details how the countries are using the restoration barometer tool to track progress on their restoration commitments under global agreements, which total 48 million hectares by 2030. Through restoration, 12 million jobs were created and over 145 million tonnes of carbon were sequestered in 2022, it concludes.

A large group of institutional investors also announced the formation of Nature Action 100, a new global engagement initiative that focuses on investors driving urgent action on nature-related risks and dependencies in the companies they own.

The initiative aims to drive greater corporate ambition and action on tackling nature loss and biodiversity decline. It is also intended to complement the GBF that emerges from Cop15 by identifying private sector actions that need to be taken to protect and restore nature. The goal is to then catalyse these actions via investor-company engagements.

More than half of the world’s GDP – $44 trillion of economic value generation – is either moderately or highly reliant on nature’s services. Some estimates say tens of billions of dollars in assets could be at risk of stranding over the next five to 10 years if companies continue to produce deforestation-linked commodities.

[ Cop15 Q&A: Why this biodiversity summit should matter to everyone ]

Adam Kanzer of BNP Paribas Asset Management said: “Over the years, there have been many important investor engagements with corporations that touched on aspects of the biodiversity crisis, but none that placed biodiversity front and centre, focusing on reversing nature loss by 2030. Nature Action 100 intends to fill that gap, engaging a broad range of companies on their most significant impacts to help place them on nature-positive pathways. We have no time to lose.”

Mayors from 15 major cities around the world called for increased direct financing to allow cities to implement ambitious greening and ecosystem restoration projects. With the planet experiencing a decline in nature at rates unprecedented in human history – and the largest loss of animal and plant species since the dinosaurs –, cities can play an important role to address biodiversity loss.

“Cities must be part of the solution to the biodiversity crisis,” said Sheila Aggarwal-Khan, director of UN Environment Programme’s economy division. “We hope mayors’ call for increased, direct investment will not fall on deaf ears so that they can unleash the power of nature in cities.”

Cities are on the frontline of the socio-economic impacts of climate change and ecosystem loss, but many were already taking ambitious action to protect and restore nature, noted Aggarwal-Khan.

Meanwhile, Minister for Heritage Malcolm Noonan, who is due to lead the Irish negotiation team during the final days of Cop15, has had to curtail his participation because he has to vote on a Dáil motion of confidence in Minister for Housing Darragh O’Brien on Tuesday.

The motion has been called to counter the Opposition motion of no confidence in Mr O’Brien tabled by People Before Profit and scheduled for Wednesday. While a pairing is possible for the latter, it is not possible for the Tuesday vote.

Mr Noonan had originally planned to fly to Canada at the weekend and stay until next Friday. As it turns out, he will spend less than 48 hours at Cop15, but he said he was confident he would get to deliver Ireland’s statement at a high-level segment on Thursday.

“Cop15 is the most important global meeting on biodiversity in over a decade and there is urgent work to do to secure new 2030 goals for nature that stop the loss and put us on a path to restoration,” Mr Noonan said.

[ The stakes could not be higher at Cop15, where countries must map way to save biodiversity on Earth ]

He will be in Montreal for most of a high-level ministerial meeting, which is separate to Cop15 negotiations but can be a key political mechanism to break any impasse in the negotiation rooms with a view to injecting momentum into the talks.

Padraic Fogarty, campaigns officer with Irish Wildlife Trust, who is an observer at Cop15, said the timing of the vote “could scarcely be worse given that it’s disrupting the Government’s participation in the Cop15 event”.

Referring to the motion, he added: “This kind of performative politics is a terrible distraction when we urgently need to focus on the serious threat we all face from biodiversity collapse.”