By Steven Cohen, Ph.D., Director of the M.S. in Sustainability Management program, School of Professional Studies
Those of us concerned about damage to ecosystems and biodiversity loss need to ask the climate change advocates: who handles your public relations work? The Climate change COPs are media extravaganzas, essentially the climate change industry’s trade show. Media attention is non-stop. In comparison, the 16th Biodiversity COP now underway in Cali, Colombia seems to be going on in secret. I suppose it doesn’t help that this year’s Biodiversity COP is taking place at the same time as a truly terrifying national election in the United States. But while climate change is an obvious existential threat to human well-being, biodiversity loss may be too complex and too subtle to engender the response it deserves. The other issue is that if 15 biodiversity COPS haven’t solved the problem, why would the 16th do any better? As I wrote two years ago during COP 15:
“I always find the coverage of these conferences fascinating as reporters and delegates gather and pretend that they are participating in and covering a great arena of global decision-making. In fact, whatever is agreed to—if anything is agreed to—cannot be enforced in a world of sovereign nations. Any resemblance to operational reality may well be purely coincidental. Perhaps even worse: it appears that no one is paying attention.”
I’m afraid that over the past two years, biodiversity and ecology have still not moved to the center of global diplomacy or national policymaking. Very little progress is being made although the environmental significance of biodiversity is if anything more important. On October 21, New York Times reporter Catrin Einhorn eloquently summed up the full dimensions of the world’s biodiversity crisis in her report on this year’s Biodiversity COP. According to Einhorn:
“On the agenda is life on earth, in all its forms and diversity. The big question is how far nations will go to stop the disastrous declines underway. Representatives from more than 175 countries are gathering to negotiate answers… at what is expected to be the largest United Nations biodiversity conference in history. How the talks unfold over the next two weeks will help determine, for better or worse, the planet’s future. Biodiversity is declining faster than at any time in human history, an intergovernmental panel of scientists found in 2019. It estimated that a million species were in danger of extinction. Even many common species are in decline. Bird populations in the United States and Canada, for example, are down almost 30 percent since 1970, with widespread losses among some of the most frequently seen species. The biggest driver of declines in biodiversity on land is habitat loss, mainly when land is taken for agriculture, the panel found. In the ocean, it’s overfishing. Climate change plays an ever-growing role, and the two crises are intertwined. Such drastic losses of biodiversity threaten human well-being, scientists warn. Forests filled with birdsong also stash away planet-warming carbon, filter water and create rain. Healthy rivers and oceans run with fish that people need for food. Insects nourish soil and pollinate plants, birds and mammals disperse seeds, plants turn sunshine into food for the rest of us.”
At the heart of the issue is that the parts of the planet still retaining the greatest amount of undeveloped land and relatively intact ecosystems are often located in nations too poor to protect these resources. Efforts to generate revenues or transfer funds from rich to poor nations to fund protection have proven ineffective. The problem is that on a planet where we have slowly become aware of our interdependent biosphere, political power is exercised by sovereign nation-states with narrow and short-term definitions of self-interest. We see this in a variety of areas of global environmental policy, most notably biodiversity, pollution in the ocean, and climate change. Progress in protecting biodiversity has been slow and halting with nations making ambitious pledges and then ignoring them. Reporting in The Guardian last week, Luke Taylor observed that:
“Cop16 is the first time countries will meet to discuss global biodiversity since the Kunming-Montreal agreement in 2022 when world leaders made a series of unprecedented pledges to protect the natural world. Ecologists say the number of the world’s animals, plants, fungi and microorganisms are collapsing under the pressures of deforestation, pollution and the climate crisis. Only 10% of the 196 parties who signed the 2022 agreement have since released the nature action plans they agreed to deliver…funding is well short of the $20bn a year needed to protect nature and only 2.8% of the world’s ocean is protected “effectively”.”
Both climate policy and biodiversity policy depend on an understanding of scientific facts and environmental trends. In the case of climate change, the emergence of dramatic and damaging extreme weather events over the past several decades has provided a simple and easy-to-understand example of the impact of a warming planet. If a similar impact emerges from biodiversity loss, the impact’s scope could well be deeply threatening to human well-being. In some respects, invasive species and contagions like COVID-19 are examples of these more biologically based threats. They are often difficult to understand, predict, prevent or remedy. By comparison, climate change is relatively simple, even if some manage to deny its reality.
Despite the lack of progress thus far, I confess to optimism based on the widespread cultural change I see, particularly among young people. It is becoming more common to pay attention to the impact of our economic life on the natural environment. Where once this was a view held by a tiny minority of people, the concern for environmental impact is growing rapidly. It’s true, that as a sustainability educator, I am constantly amid young people dedicated to environmental protection. I’m certain that influences my perceptions. But since I’ve been engaged in environmental education for about forty years, I am encouraged by the rapidly growing number of students choosing to study in programs in environmental sustainability science, policy, and management. The cultural change I am seeing is also being reflected in a redefinition of effective organizational management that insists on more mindful consideration of the impact of an organization on its natural and social environment. Thus far, this is generally limited to the developed world and is not as common in the developing world where the typical goal is to escape poverty in any way possible. If that requires ecosystem destruction, the mindset can be: what choice do we have? The goal of meetings like COP16 is to develop economic alternatives to ecosystem destruction. One goal of sustainability education is to encourage the type of creative thinking that results in new and more effective preservation tactics. But progress remains painfully slow and given how little we really understand the interconnected systems that support biodiversity; some destruction will certainly be irreversible.
Although my overall view is optimistic, there is one element of the biodiversity crisis that reduces my sense of hope. Sadly, the United States has never signed the global biodiversity agreement. As Benji Jones wrote in VOX last week, it is:
“...important...to keep in mind is that although the US helped negotiate the Convention on Biological Diversity — the treaty under which COP16 takes place — it’s not a formal member of the agreement. In fact, the US is the only country, other than the Vatican, that’s not party to the Convention.”
President Bill Clinton tried to get the Senate to ratify the treaty, but conservative Republicans during the 1990s refused, a political view that continues today. We saw similar political maneuvering when Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Climate Agreement and Joe Biden then “rejoined”. Since problems like climate and biodiversity are global in nature, at least some element of the approach to these problems requires global agreements. If these agreements are seen in American politics as political and ideological, global cooperation will be difficult to achieve.
America’s political polarization and resurgent isolationism mean that for the low-key biodiversity COP to gain greater visibility and priority, it must somehow achieve this without American participation, let alone leadership. Even if the Democrats achieve victories in the November election, the dysfunction of America’s national government is unlikely to end soon. Therefore, the path to global biodiversity preservation must somehow be found in someplace that isn’t Washington, D.C. While I’m not betting on Cali, Colombia, it would be great if I could be proven wrong.
About the Program
The Columbia University M.S. in Sustainability Management program offered by the School of Professional Studies in partnership with the Climate School provides students cutting-edge policy and management tools they can use to help public and private organizations and governments address environmental impacts and risks, pollution control, and remediation to achieve sustainability. The program is customized for working professionals and is offered as both a full- and part-time course of study.
