Biodiversity’s Biggest Event Is Underway In Colombia

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: This is Science Friday. I’m Sophie Bushwick, senior news editor at New Scientist. I’m filling in for Ira Flatow.

A bit later in the hour, sewer systems are crumbling across the country. We’ll look at what’s needed to fix them, and how insects changed the human world, from food to fashion. But first, this week, representatives of nearly 200 countries are gathered in Cali, Colombia, for COP16, the UN’s conference on biodiversity and protecting nature. In 2022, nearly every country in the world agreed on an ambitious deal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030. So how’s our progress, and what will this year’s conference focus on?

Joining me today to help break it down for us is my guest, Benji Jones, environmental correspondent at Vox, based in New York. Welcome back to Science Friday.

BENJI JONES: Hey, good to be with you.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: So get us up to speed. Tell us about COP16.

BENJI JONES: Yeah. So COP16 is, I would argue, the most important conference for nature in the world. And it happens about every two years. This year it’s happening in Colombia. And what’s so important about these events is that it brings together all the environmental leaders from around the world, essentially, which includes environmental ministers, some heads of state, even, as well as NGO leaders, scientists. So they’re really trying to figure out a way to put an end to just this rampant loss that we’re seeing in our forests and with wildlife as well.

So this meeting, COP16, is under a global treaty, called the Convention on Biological Diversity. And it’s essentially an agreement among almost every country in the world to conserve nature and to share the benefits of nature– so things like cosmetics or medicines that are derived from plants and animals. That treaty was crafted in the ’90s. And ever since then, we’ve had these conferences of all the governments that were part of that treaty that come together. And those conferences are known as COPs. And this COP, 16, is the 16th one of those conferences.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: But the US is not really part of this, right?

BENJI JONES: Yes, that’s right. So when I said nearly every country is a part of this agreement, the US is the one exception, in addition to the Vatican state, but that’s very, very tiny. The US is, of course, a powerhouse financially, economically, and it is not part of this agreement. And that’s because the US Senate has not ratified the treaty. So we’ve signed the agreement, but we haven’t actually joined it formally through the ratification process.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Why not?

BENJI JONES: Yeah. So the US tends to not like treaties in general because some lawmakers worry that, by signing up to some global agreement, we’re going to have to change the way we do things. It’s going to infringe on our economics, our businesses, and so forth.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And I mentioned earlier that, at the last conference, there was this big deal made to stop biodiversity loss by 2030. So how is that going?

BENJI JONES: I guess the short of it is not super great. So by most measures, we’re still seeing pretty horrific rates of biodiversity loss. There was a recent report that showed that the average size of animal populations has declined by over 70% in the last 50 years. We’ve seen millions of hectares of forests cut down. In the last year alone, 3 billion birds have disappeared from North America.

So there are a lot of negative signs for biodiversity, and it doesn’t seem like we have made much progress in reversing those trends. There’s been some positive movement. So we’ve done a good job at restoring some forests. But, since 2022, when these countries agreed on this landmark deal, as you mentioned– which really, really was a huge moment; it includes all these different targets for conserving nature, including conserving 30% of all land and oceans by 2030– we still have a very long way to go.

So if you look at that target of conserving 30% of all land, for example, I believe the number globally right now is 17%. And if you look at the oceans, we’ve only conserved about 8%. And again, we’re trying to get to 30% by 2030. So we’re still a long ways off. And that is pretty concerning.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Let’s talk about one of the big topic areas of this year’s conference, the idea of who gets to profit from the DNA of wild organisms. Tell us about this.

BENJI JONES: Yeah. So this is one of the thorniest topics that will come up at COP16. Lots of medicines and cosmetics and other products that we use that companies sell are derived from nature. So you can think of things like aspirin, derived from some kind of bark, or penicillin, from mold. Even Botox comes from a microbe. And companies make a lot of money from these products even though they are derived from nature.

There’s been a history of companies in wealthier countries taking natural products– so taking microbes, animals, and plants, using them to create products– again, like medicines or cosmetics– selling those products, making a bunch of money, and then not sharing the benefits from those products, whether it’s money or even just access to medicines, with the countries which those animals or plants came from. So this is called biopiracy– basically, like stealing one country’s nature, commercializing it, and then not giving that country access to it. And there are a bunch of examples of this that have come up. So that’s a problem.

There is a sort of solution to this, which is that, under that convention– under the CBD, the Convention on Biological Diversity– countries are able to manage access to their resources. So if you’re a scientist working for a company that is making cosmetics, you may need to sign some sort of benefit sharing agreement to extract resources from that country. So if you want to go into the Amazon and take– I don’t know– rare plants that create some sort of compound that’s useful for a drug, you might need to agree that you will share the medicine back with the country. You might need to agree to give them other resources, like access to labs, so that they can do their own data analysis and make their own products, or whatever it might be– or money as well.

And so there is a way to manage access. But a big issue with this is that now, a lot of the plants and animals and microbes that companies use to do research for their products are present in a digital form– so basically the digital version of biodiversity. And by that I mean all these different plants and animals that are used to create products, we sequence their DNA, their RNA, their proteins, that sequence information is uploaded to databases. Those databases are, for the most part, open access, free for anyone to use. And so now companies can use genetic data in a digital form to create things– products, cosmetics, et cetera– without actually having to go into a country and extract some kind of physical sample.

So that means that companies that are using the genetics from wild animals from other countries don’t necessarily need to share benefits from those products under any kind of official agreement. So it’s a way to skirt this convention and the rules that it has for sharing benefits from nature.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: Well, I mean, do you think that they’re going to come up with a one-size-fits-all rule for what to do about that, or is this going to be one of those things where it’s a case-by-case basis?

BENJI JONES: Yeah. So if there is news that’s going to come out of this conference, it will be related to an agreement about what to do with this digital genetic information and who should manage it and benefit from it. I would say it’s sort of 50/50 right now whether countries are going to reach an agreement. You have a lot of the wealthier countries that don’t want any sort of mandatory benefit sharing related to this digital sequence information, or DSI.

You have a lot of developing countries say, look, companies and sectors that rely on the sequence information should be mandated to pay into some kind of fund that will then send money to developing countries or countries that have high biodiversity. But it’s not clear just yet whether there’s going to be an agreement on this. And it is going to be very, very contentious just because there’s a big, yeah, kind of north-south divide between developed and developing countries around what to do here.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And what are the other big topic areas of this conference?

BENJI JONES: Yeah. So the other big one, I would say, is money– how to raise more money for biodiversity conservation. So about two years ago, a report came out that identified that there was a $700 billion gap yearly for funding conservation. So if we want to stop the decline of nature, protect biodiversity, we need to come up with another $700 billion a year.

And so the big deal that countries struck in 2022, this landmark deal to conserve nature, mentions that there’s this $700 billion gap. They mentioned some of the ways to find that money. So rich countries should be paying poor countries for conserving their biodiversity. We should see the private sector involved. We should also see subsidy reform. So basically, figuring out how to close the $700 billion gap in funding for nature is going to be another really hotly debated topic at COP, and it’s not totally clear that we’ll see agreement on that either.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: I mean, is there any way to combine those two– like use some of the profits from organisms’ DNA to fund conservation?

BENJI JONES: Sophie, that’s a great question. And one of the ideas on the table is just that– so creating a fund that comes from payments from companies that rely on DSI, and that fund would raise money that would then go towards closing this funding gap. I think there’s just a question of how much money that would actually create. There are a lot of skeptics that, if you’re actually trying to get companies to pay into a fund, they’re not going to actually pay that much money. So it’s not going to make a ton of headway on closing this gap. But it’s definitely an idea on the table and something that a lot of countries want to see.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: And COP16 can produce these big global agreements– and we’ve seen this before with other global agreements like the Paris Agreement on Climate– but the question is, do they even work?

BENJI JONES: Oh, God, that is a very good question because I often feel a little bit jaded. When I go to these events and the level of ambition is super high, everyone seems to agree on what needs to happen when you’re in these spaces. And you see similar things at New York Climate Week, for example. It’s super high energy, a ton of excitement. But then, when everybody returns back to their own countries and faces priorities that might be very different than what these environmental leaders are agreeing to, you tend to see a lessening of the ambition.

So there was actually a set of similar targets agreed to in 2010, called the Aichi targets. Those targets were supposed to be met by 2020, and not a single target was met. And so there has been this disconnect between ambition and reality.

I think, on the bright side, biodiversity is getting more attention than it ever has before. And by setting these ambitious targets, you at least raise the bar for what people think will happen. And it does, I think, move the needle at least a little bit. It kind of lights a fire under the private sector to do more around this stuff. Governments feel more motivated to do conservation. And really, just getting everyone in the room at the same time, that alone is a pretty big deal.

So I don’t think that there’s no purpose to these events. I think that the pressure just needs to be applied constantly for anything to happen.

SOPHIE BUSHWICK: That’s all the time we have for now. I’d like to thank my guest, Benji Jones, environmental correspondent at Vox, based in New York.

BENJI JONES: Thank you.

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