Adversity for Biodiversity: A Reflection on My Experience at COP15

• Rob Harding
• April 17, 2023
• Forum Papers
• Forum Paper
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Adversity for Biodiversity: A Reflection on My Experience at COP15
An NPG Forum Paper
by Rob Harding
April 2023

Abstract: The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework¹ adopted in December 2022 by representatives of most of the world’s national governments is inadequate to halt and reverse the disturbing loss of biodiversity globally. Concerted efforts to increase the new Framework’s ambition were dismissed and ultimately ignored. Human overshoot – the collective impacts of more than eight billion people – remains a taboo topic, even during the highest-level negotiations regarding the protection of remaining life on Earth. Rather than being a leader, the United States is missing in action. I offer my perspective as an American conservationist, wilderness and wildlife advocate, and planetary health activist who attended COP15.

Setting the Scene

Headed into my trip to Montreal to attend COP15 – the Convention on Biological Diversity’s 15th Conference of the Parties, I had the writing of ecologist and ecological economist William Rees on my mind. Regarding biodiversity loss, Rees wrote:

It is caused by many individual but interacting factors — habitat loss, climate change, intensive pesticide use and various forms of industrial pollution, for example, suppress both insect and bird populations. But the overall driver is what an ecologist might call the “competitive displacement” of nonhuman life by the inexorable growth of the human enterprise.

On a finite planet where millions of species share the same space and depend on the same finite products of photosynthesis, the continuous expansion of one species necessarily drives the contraction and extinction of others. (Politicians take note — there is always a conflict between human population/economic expansion and “protection of the environment.”)²

With most of the world’s national governments calling for halting and reversing the loss of biodiversity globally, as the United States government documented in a press release published during COP15³, surely the overall driver of biodiversity loss would be a top priority COP15 agenda item. Wrong! A recognition of the “competitive displacement of non-human life by the inexorable growth of the human enterprise”⁴ was not on the agenda...Continue reading the full Forum paper by clicking here.