Editorial: Landmark agreement

UN COP 15 in Montreal is a historic deal as it commits to protect nature from further destruction.

Hyderabad: Biodiversity has been declining worldwide at rates never seen before in human history. Nearly one million land and marine species are facing extinction because of human actions. Scientists have warned that the world is entering the sixth mass extinction, driven by human greed including deforestation, burning fossil fuels and polluting rivers and oceans. As much as 40% of the world’s land has been degraded, and wildlife population sizes have shrunk dramatically since 1970. The last extinction event of that magnitude was the one that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. Against this grim backdrop, the just-concluded agreement at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (UN COP 15) in Montreal is a landmark achievement in the global efforts to protect nature from further destruction. The historic deal, on the lines of the Paris Agreement, commits to progressively increase the level of financial resources from all sources by 2030, mobilising at least $200 billion per year. Overall, the deal lays out a suite of 23 environmental targets and the most prominent among them is to place 30% of land and sea under protection. Currently, about 17% of the planet’s land and roughly 8% of its oceans are protected, with restrictions on activities like fishing, farming and mining. Some of the targets included in the accord — cutting environmentally ‘destructive’ farming subsidies and reducing the risk from pesticides — could be contentious and tricky for developing countries.

India has been arguing that a numerical global target for pesticide reduction in the agriculture sector is unnecessary and must be left for countries to decide, because ‘one size fits all’ prescription will not work. The agriculture sector in India, like other developing countries, is the source of livelihood and culture for hundreds of millions of people and the government’s support to it cannot be targeted for elimination. After four years of intense negotiations with tensions over how to finance global conservation proving to be a particular sticking point, an agreement was finally hammered out with an aim to arrest the biodiversity loss which, if left unchecked, could jeopardize the planet’s food and water supplies as well as the existence of innumerable species around the world. No doubt, this is a big moment for conservation. Now, the question is whether the deal’s lofty targets will be realised. While there are multiple causes of biodiversity loss, humans are behind each one. On land, the biggest driver is agriculture. At sea, it’s overfishing. Other factors include mining, climate change and pollution. The agreement aims to address these drivers. Questions over how to balance the deal’s ambition with the ability of countries to pay for it generated sharp disagreements at the talks, along with demands to create a new global biodiversity fund. China, which led the talks, and Canada, which hosted, worked to strike a delicate middle ground.

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