One million species are threatened with extinction, soils are becoming infertile, and water sources are drying up, creating the possibility of a major breakdown of the ecosystem, with famines and droughts becoming more and more widespread. This was the finding of a document prepared for a recent UN conference on halting the destruction of the natural world. Global warming was reported as being a key factor negatively affecting this process.
The global food system is the major driver of biodiversity loss, with agricultural expansion threatening 85% of the 28,000 most endangered species. Chemical pollution is also a major culprit in biodiversity and ecosystem loss. Plants and insect populations are dramatically falling due to the use of highly dangerous insecticides.
Probably the biggest single threat to the marine ecosystem is over-fishing. Modern factory ships use sonar technology to detect shoals and have massive trawling equipment that can reach the sea floor. This combination is destroying whole populations of fish. Ninety percent of large fish such as tuna, cod and halibut have been wiped out, causing a shift in the ocean ecosystem to one in which small plankton eating animals predominate, such as jelly-fish.
Tens if not hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost as the Newfoundland, North Sea and Baltic Sea fisheries have largely collapsed. The attention of the big companies has now turned to the Pacific, the only remaining area not yet fished out. The same fate awaits this region as befell the North Sea, if the present profit-driven approach is not fundamentally changed.
Plastic pollution is now recognised to be a major threat to sea-life, most of it from household and commercial waste. Marine plastic pollution has grown ten times since 1980, affecting 267 animal species, including 86% of marine turtles, 44% of sea birds and 43% of marine mammals. Bulk plastic debris kills sea creatures when it is eaten or when they get tangled up in it. Microplastics are also a serious health problem, not only to fish when they are ingested, but to humans when they enter the food chain as fish are eaten. Ingested microplastic particles can physically damage organs and leach hazardous chemicals that can compromise immune function and suppress growth and reproduction.
Climate change could be threatening one in six species at the global level. Since ecosystems such as wetlands, peatlands and forests absorb carbon dioxide, the major driver of global warming, their conservation is vital to achieving targets to check global temperature increases. Since 1990, about 490 million hectares of forest has been lost to agricultural expansion. For comparison, the UK has an area of 29 million hectares.
In parallel to international conferences to address climate change, similar events have taken place to halt the destruction of the natural environment. In December 2022, under UN auspices, a conference was held in Montreal where agreement was reached to set up the Global Biodiversity Framework, aiming to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030. The details of how to achieve this ambitious target were left unresolved and a follow-up conference was held in Cali, Columbia in October 2024 to address the contentious issues.
The Cali conference took place just before the latest climate change summit in Azerbaijan, a recognition that global warming and biodiversity loss are closely linked. As with climate change, the most controversial issue at the meeting was money, with so-called ‘digital sequence information’ (DSI) to the fore in Cali.
The dispute over DSI relates to the exploitation by big pharma, healthcare corporations, agri-business and technology conglomerates in the West of the genetic information contained in certain plants and animals, found mainly in poor countries. This information is used by firms in the ‘Global North’ to make pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and food, among other products.
For decades, UN-sponsored negotiations have taken place to try to ensure the benefits are shared fairly with the peoples living in the countries where the genetic resources are found. At the 2022 biodiversity conference in Montreal, the agenda included ‘closing the finance gap for nature’ and it was agreed to establish a fund and mechanism to ensure the sharing of DSI benefits. There was deadlock on the funding mechanism, but after pressure from ‘developing’ countries, a Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) was set up as an interim finance facility.
However, there were major loopholes unresolved, so in the run-up to the Cali conference intensive negotiations took place to address the controversial issues. In particular, who would pay to use DSI, how much, and what would trigger the payments. It was agreed that companies using genetic data benefiting from DSI, “should” contribute 1% of their profits or 0.1% of their revenue, whichever was greater. However, the figures agreed were indicative, not mandatory, and the use of ‘should’ in the text also implied that any action was to be voluntary. African and Latin American countries had unsuccessfully tried to include a binding clause in the agreement.
In terms of the overall sums to be raised there was also deep conflict. There was a proposal for industrialised capitalist countries to commit to raise “at least” $20bn by 2025 (ie two months after the conference) and to raise $700bn by 2030 to close the biodiversity finance gap. By September 2024, two months before the Cali gathering, less than $250 million had been contributed to the GBFF by seven ‘developed’ countries. The delegate from Zimbabwe, speaking for Africa and Brazil, reasonably called the expectation that Western powers would meet their target “wishful thinking”. Just before the end of the conference, the GBFF pledges had increased to only $396 million. Irene Wabiwa Betoko from Greenpeace said, “We are talking millions that have been pledged… but what we are expecting are billions”. Lim Li Ching of the Third World Network told Carbon Brief that “the [Global] North gets to keep the status quo”.
In a desperate attempt to get the Western powers to up their contributions and therefore secure agreement, the Columbian conference chair raised a proposal at the last moment to include biodiversity credits in the deal. As strong supporters of the ‘High Integrity Principles for Biodiversity Markets’ framework, launched just before the conference, Britain and France were the most prominent backers of this proposal. Market trading of carbon credits, ie permits to pollute, to tackle global warming, launched in 2004 after the Kyoto agreement, proved to be totally ineffective in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon credits, making market traders millions, became notorious for scams and corruption. There is no reason to think biodiversity credits would be any more effective, particularly since, like Kyoto, the USA will not be involved, having boycotted Cali and all previous similar conferences. (One reason for the failure of the Kyoto treaty was that the two biggest polluters, the USA and China, refused to take part.)
Green lobbyists at the Cali conference were totally opposed to market credits’ trading. One told Carbon Brief: “In 2010, they killed the idea of biodiversity credits. Nobody thought it would come back like a zombie”. The conference ended without agreement, and will be reconvened in spring this year. The gulf between the money offered and that expected is so large the prospects for any meaningful agreement look bleak. Poor countries will most probably have to put up with minor concessions at best, as they nearly always have had to. Imperialist antagonisms, particularly between the main powers, have reached such a level that the big corporations and the governments who represent their interests refuse to give even relatively small sums to address one aspect of the environmental crisis. This emphasises how remote are the prospects for agreement on global warming, where far greater amounts are involved.
Pete Dickenson