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The age of extinctionUN biodiversity summit 2020



ALL EYES ON CHINA: WHAT TO LOOK OUT FOR AT THE UN BIODIVERSITY SUMMIT

Milu deer on wetland in Jiangsu province. China’s environmental commitments are
being closely watched. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images
Milu deer on wetland in Jiangsu province. China’s environmental commitments are
being closely watched. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images

Everything you need to know about who will be there, who’s staying away and what
the hot topics will be at Wednesday’s virtual event in New York



The age of extinction is supported by

About this content
Patrick Greenfield
@pgreenfielduk
Tue 29 Sep 2020 11.30 BST

Last modified on Thu 1 Oct 2020 14.00 BST

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The year 2020 was meant to be a super year for nature and biodiversity,
according to the UN. But with swathes of the planet in lockdown, Covid-19 has
highlighted the risk of humanity’s unstable relationship with nature, with
repeated warnings linking the pandemic with the destruction of ecosystems and
species.

On Wednesday, the world will gather to discuss the biodiversity crisis at a
virtual summit in New York. The UN secretary general, António Guterres, Prince
Charles and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, will open proceedings. Here is
what to look out for.




WILL CHINA STEP UP?

Next year China will for the first time host major international talks on the
environment – postponed from this year – at Cop15 in Kunming, where the
international community will agree a Paris-style agreement for nature. The
stakes are high: governments failed to meet any of the UN targets to slow
biodiversity loss for the previous decade and the drum beat of warnings about
the state of the planet’s health is growing louder. Now the world’s biggest
greenhouse gas emitter is tasked with using its growing might to corral 196
countries into agreeing a plan worthy of the crisis.

Q&A

WHAT IS BIODIVERSITY AND WHY DOES IT MATTER?

Show

Biodiversity is the variety of life on Earth, in all its forms and all its
interactions. “Without biodiversity, there is no future for humanity,” says Prof
David Macdonald, at Oxford University. It is comprised of several levels,
starting with genes, then individual species, then communities of creatures and
finally entire ecosystems, such as forests or coral reefs, where life interplays
with the physical environment. 

Without plants there would be no oxygen and without bees to pollinate there
would be no fruit or nuts. The services provided by ecosystems are estimated to
be worth trillions of dollars – double the world’s GDP. Biodiversity loss in
Europe alone is estimated to cost the continent about 3% of its GDP, or €450m
(£400m) a year.

The extinction rate of species is now thought to be about 1,000 times
higher than before humans dominated the planet, which may be even faster than
the losses after a giant meteorite wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago.
The sixth mass extinction in geological history has already begun, according to
some scientists, with billions of individual populations being lost. Researchers
call the massive loss of wildlife a “biological annihilation”. 

Changes to the climate are reversible, even if that takes centuries or
millennia, and conservation efforts can work. But once species become extinct,
there is no going back.

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China’s modern record on the environment is poor. Rapid economic development and
huge infrastructure projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative have come at a
huge cost to nature, destroying precarious ecosystems and leaving many cities
with severe air pollution. But Beijing is uniquely placed to influence countries
eager to follow its development model but distrustful of the conservation-focus
approach of some European nations whose wild areas largely disappeared with
industrialisation.

World leaders pledge to halt Earth’s destruction ahead of UN summit
Read more

“I think China is absolutely critical to the issue of both climate change and
biodiversity and land degradation. We are not going to solve these problems
without leadership from China,” says Sir Robert Watson, former chair of the
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
(IPBES), which informs the UN biodiversity negotiations with the latest science.

Some privately suspect that President Xi will surprise world leaders with
another major environmental commitment during his speech at the summit’s
opening, just days after he ramped up China’s carbon commitments by pledging to
achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.


With coalmines, power stations and chemical plants around the city of
Huolinguole polluting Inner Mongolia’s Keerqin grassland, authorities replaced
grazing animals with sculptures. China has pledged to be carbon neutral by 2060.
Photograph: Lu Guang/Greenpeace

“They’ve had some really bad examples of land degradation when they deforested
the Yangtze basin. Now, as I understand it, they’ve done a fairly significant
replanting of trees in the Yangtze basin because it was leading to extreme
floods and dust bowls. They also, of course, have terrible air pollution in
their cities. I’m somewhat optimistic that China wants to show it is an economic
power and play a leadership role in the world,” Watson says.

“I would argue that governments around the world need to work closely with China
and see if, collectively, we can move in the right direction.”


THE ABSENTEES AND THE RELUCTANT

Summit organisers have been overwhelmed with requests from world leaders to
speak on Wednesday. The Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, Turkish leader
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, South African prime minister Cyril Ramaphosa and Britain’s
prime minister, Boris Johnson, are among dozens of leaders jostling to make
statements at the oversubscribed event. But the talks will be marked by those
who are not scheduled to speak.



The US president, Donald Trump, will not appear and nobody from his
administration is scheduled to address the event. Brazilian foreign minister
Ernesto Araújo – who has previously dismissed the climate crisis as a Marxist
plot – had been listed to represent his country in the place of president Jair
Bolsonaro but the South American leader will now speak. Russian president
Vladimir Putin will not appear, sending the head of the ministry of natural
resources, Dmitry Kobylkin, in his place. All three men oversee vital
life-sustaining ecosystems with global significance and Brazil has traditionally
been a major player in UN environmental circles through its impressive
diplomatic machine.

But under Bolsonaro, the Amazon rainforest continues to burn and many fear
Brazil’s leader is steering his country towards environmental ruin. Last week
the president hit back at the UN general assembly for a second year in a row
about how the Amazon has been treated under his leadership, claiming Brazil was
the target of a “brutal disinformation campaign”. While the US is not a party to
the UN convention on biodiversity, Bolsonaro’s stance on the environment could
have a major sway over the final Kunming agreement. Governments will listen to
what Bolsonaro has to say with great interest.


Powerful voice: Indian youth activist Archana Soreng. Photograph: Courtesy of
Archana Soreng


ONE TO WATCH

In between the world leaders, heads of state and royalty, indigenous youth
activist Archana Soreng will also speak at the summit’s opening. The member of
the Khadia tribe in India is part of the UN secretary general’s youth advisory
group on climate change and will be a powerful voice for her generation.


AMBITION TO PROTECT THE PLANET



Before the coronavirus pandemic disrupted talks, Wednesday’s summit was meant to
be the moment international leaders gave their input before negotiators headed
to Kunming to thrash out a final agreement. While there is a danger that
governments might ignore the environmental targets while grappling to rescue
economies and save lives, there is cautious optimism that the opposite has
happened. Repeated warnings linking Covid-19 and zoonotic diseases to the
destruction of nature have focused minds.

“Look at the number of governments and states which have registered to make
statements. That clearly by itself says something,” the UN’s biodiversity head,
Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, told the Guardian. “Noticeable trends have emerged in
this period of pandemic and in lockdowns. It has really brought up the voices of
many actors we probably would not have seen or noticed.”

Despite the optimism, the ambition of the “Paris agreement for nature” will be
reflected in the detail of measurable, targeted actions. As things stand, the
draft Kunming agreement has headline targets of protecting 30% of the world’s
land and sea by 2030, introducing controls on invasive species and reducing
pollution from plastic waste and excess nutrients. Ahead of Wednesday’s summit,
64 leaders and the EU published an ambitious 10-point pledge that many privately
hope will bounce other countries into being more ambitious. Watch out for how
that translates into statements by countries such as Australia, China and India
that did not sign the pledge.


A dolphin swims in the Bosphorus near Istanbul. Turkey’s lockdown has meant less
maritime traffic and a ban on fishing. Photograph: Yasin Akgül/AFP via Getty
Images


GIVING NATURE A FINANCIAL VALUE

Expressing nature’s value in financial terms has become a big focus of
conservation efforts. With the cost of deforestation, pollution and species
extinction absent from most economic models, calculating the economic
contribution of ecosystem services that healthy forests, rivers and oceans
provide to humanity has helped reframe the conservation debate.



Ahead of the talks, the insurance company Swiss Re calculated that more than
half (55%) of global GDP, equal to $41.7tn, is dependent on high-functioning
biodiversity and ecosystem services. But the research also found that major
economies in south-east Asia, Europe and the US are exposed to ecosystem
decline. The EU, Germany, Norway, Costa Rica and the UK are leading efforts to
increase funding for nature. But to take meaningful action on the environment,
many developing nations with high biodiversity – including Brazil and a number
of African countries – want the creation of a global financial system that
recognises their ecosystem services.

The UN’s co-chair on the Kunming process, Basile van Havre, who is tasked with
combining all of the negotiating positions into a final agreement, said he
understood their position.

“I think they’re putting on the table some concerns that need to be heard. There
are commodities leaving Brazil and going to other places in the world, and
they’re feeding economies in the other places. So, if I buy food items in the
supermarket, how do we flow the money back to Brazil to support conservation? I
totally understand the need of those local communities.”

While these issues will be sorted in the midnight negotiating hours in Kunming
next year, watch for world leaders laying out their countries’ positions on
ecosystem services on Wednesday.


THE PRIVATE SECTOR AND VESTED INTERESTS

Alongside governments, banks and private companies have announced commitments to
protect nature ahead of Wednesday’s summit. HSBC, Allianz and Axa are among 26
financial institutions – representing more than €3tn in assets – calling on
world leaders to reach an agreement to protect ecosystem function. Larry Fink,
CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investor, will also take part in the
leaders’ dialogue on harnessing science, technology and innovation for
biodiversity.


What price the environment? Garibaldi fish in the Channel Islands national park,
California. Photograph: Douglas Klug/Getty Images


But like the fossil fuel industry with climate talks, there could be significant
pushback from major chemical and agricultural companies that might lose out
through restrictions on fertiliser, farming practices and pollution through any
agreement. Half a billion dollars of environmentally harmful government
subsidies was highlighted as a key failure in the UN report on biodiversity
targets.

“The landscape in the private sector is a bit different on nature and that’s one
advantage we have,” Van Havre notes. “All that system of agri-food is very
active and very worried because their bottom line depends on effective natural
systems. They’re very engaged. They’ve learned from their climate change
experience. So we’re not dragging them, they’re dragging us.

“It’s a very different world from the energy sector. We’re going to need to feed
more people. So if anything, they have a bigger place in the world, it’s just a
very different place.”


THE SUMMIT AS A FOCAL POINT FOR CAMPAIGNERS

Ahead of the meeting, conservation groups and organisations have fired off a
slew of press releases about biodiversity and their campaigning goals. Business
leaders and philanthropists have announced increased funding for the
preservation of nature alongside foreign ministers. The Wildlife Trusts has
launched a £30m fundraising appeal alongside the UK’s new commitment to protect
30% of land and sea by 2030. Most events have been based around the four-day
Nature for Life events, with discussions on the sustainable development goals,
business and nature, global ambition and local action.

• This article was amended on 30 September 2020 to reflect an update to the list
of leaders expected to address the summit. A caption was also expanded, for
avoidance of doubt, to make clear that the sheep photographed were sculptures.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters
Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and
features



Topics
 * UN biodiversity summit 2020
 * The age of extinction

 * Biodiversity
 * United Nations
 * China
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 * Prince Charles
 * Xi Jinping
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