On target for disappointment

The Fifth Global Biodiversity Outlook is in and the judges are unanimous – we need better targets

By David Salt

Guess what? Humanity has missed its targets and is failing life on Earth.

We know this because the latest (and grandest) stocktake of efforts to save biodiversity has just been released and it shows that the world has failed to meet a single target it agreed to back in 2010. The stocktake is known as the Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO), and this is the fifth such report.

GBO 5 reports on progress of 20 targets signed up to by signatories to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at Aichi in Japan in 2010. They are known as the Aichi Targets.

Rather than demonstrating that humanity acknowledges the existential importance of our natural capital and that we might be making steps to look after it, this Outlook report has told us we’re doing the opposite – we’re burning up that capital faster than ever before.

One stand out failure, among many, is that governments around the world are still subsidising environmental damage to the tune of $500 billion, rather than dismantling these perverse policies as they committed to do.

The funny thing is, rather than serving as a wakeup call galvanising governments to change their course, the general response has been to debate what will go into the next set of targets being discussed soon in Kunming China. If the current targets simply set us up for failure – even though they were designed to slow and maybe reverse the destruction of humanity’s life support – then maybe we should adopt more measured targets that are achievable. See the humour there?

Countdown to disappointment

The lead up to this epic fail (as documented by GBO 5) goes back some 30 years, in a documentable sense anyway; the broader history of biodiversity decline is really the flip side of the rise of Homo sapiens.

From the 1960s on there was growing concern around the world that rampant economic growth was resulting in unsustainable environmental degradation with the decline of biodiversity being one of its most worrying manifestations. To address this, most of the world’s nations signed up to the Convention of Biological Diversity (CBD) in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio (though the US, along with Andorra, Iraq and Somalia, never ratified it). In this Convention, signatories promised to do something about declining biodiversity.

In 2002, at the World Summit on Sustainable Development held in Johannesburg (famously boycotted by US President George W Bush), signatories agreed to refine this somewhat vague aspiration by agreeing to work to specific targets – these being to halt or reverse declines in biodiversity by the year 2010. To celebrate what nations signing up to the CBD hoped would be achieved, 2010 was declared the International Year of Biodiversity.

Well, rather than demonstrate the success of the CBD, the release of the third Global Biodiversity Outlook in 2010 revealed that biodiversity declines were accelerating (at all scales), that the drivers of decline (land clearing, invasive species, over exploitation, pollution and climate change) were growing and that the future was looking bleak.

I remember reading the press statements put out at the time of the release of the Global Biodiversity Outlook 3 – in what was supposed to be a celebratory International Year of Biodiversity – and feeling both disappointed and disgusted. The issue wasn’t being meaningfully addressed, the losses were accelerating and forecasts were of worse to come.

So, how did the UN and the organisers of the CBD respond to the breathtaking failure of 2010? They came up with a more comprehensive and nuanced set of targets (the Aichi Targets) for what was needed to be achieved by 2020!

Well now it’s 2020

The fact we’ve failed again comes as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying even half attention to the news in the past decade. But it does leave you gasping. It also makes you wonder what it would take to convince humanity to start making a difference when it comes to conserving biodiversity.

Last year the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released its own global assessment of biodiversity. Amidst headlines shouting that 1,000,000 species are threatened with extinction, IPBES said the world needs ‘transformative change’; and by that they meant a “fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.”

At the time I expressed significant pessimism that the world would listen or do anything because transformative change never comes easy. It requires considerable sacrifice, and the elites who hold the power and derive the most benefits from the existing status quo do the most to block any change that threatens that balance.

“The American way of life is not up for negotiation,” said President George Bush (Snr) at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, the event where the Convention of Biological Diversity was signed. Sustainability is all well and good, but not if it requires the rich to forego their privilege.

Which means if you want international consensus on biodiversity you have to be very careful with the targets you choose and the way you word them.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t

However, if your targets are consistently not being met, and collapsing ecosystems (the Great Barrier Reef is but one high profile example) and accelerating species loss and histrionic calls to arms are not galvanising widespread action, then what do you do?

What do you do in the face of an existential threat when the world doesn’t seem to want to know? It’s a question I’ve asked myself so many times between 2010 (the failed International Year of Biodiversity) and this latest gloomy report and I think many people resort to nihilism or fundamentalism. Others stay engaged and attempt to make the next step something that works better.

And yet those policy makers, conservationists and diplomats working for a more effective set of targets in 2030 (or whenever) do so in the knowledge there’s little prospect for significant improvement in government policy on the horizon (just consider our own government’s efforts over environmental policy reform).

However, even if we missed the boat on CBD targets, there’s considerable evidence suggesting efforts to conserve biodiversity since the CBD came into force in 1993 have had some impact. As Stuart Butchart, Chief Scientist at Birdlife International, points out, without those efforts 28-48 bird and mammal species would have gone extinct and the extinction rate in recent decades would have been at least 3-4 times higher. What’s more, he says that protected areas are contributing measurably to conserving species in some of the world’s most diverse and threatened terrestrial ecosystems.

So, the future looks grim but we know there are conservation tools that can make a difference. Our real target should be how we make our political leaders agree to deploy them.

Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay