'COP15 offers a major opportunity for governments to achieve a breakthrough— equivalent to the 2015 Paris climate agreement—that unites the world behind one mission: to halt, and ideally reverse, biodiversity loss by the end of this decade.'
In Montreal this month, governments will come together at the Convention on Biological Diversity's COP15 summit to agree on a global deal to put the world's biodiversity on a path to recovery by 2030. We cannot afford for this conference to be treated as a sideshow or afterthought to COP27. The biodiversity crisis is no less important than the climate crisis, and it is escalating quickly. It must be a top political priority for all countries.
When I was first elected president of Colombia in 2010, I found myself running a country that was almost entirely flooded for 18 months. The climate pattern known as La Niña, aggravated by global warming, meant near-biblical rainfall. Lacking the tools or knowhow to handle the situation, we saw that we needed to make peace with nature. Experts advised focusing on the protection of biodiversity, so that is what we did.
As an economic matter, the collapse of certain essential ecosystems is all it would take to push countries like mine into bankruptcy. Consider, for example, that around 75% of food crops rely on animal pollinators such as bees, birds, and butterflies. The loss of all animal pollinators seems unthinkable, yet it is a real threat. And if food becomes scarcer, the poorest will suffer first.
Forests, wetlands, underwater kelp forests, mangroves, and other natural systems also provide protection from extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heatwaves, and storms, by acting as natural buffers or reservoirs. Biodiversity loss not only makes climate change worse, but also eliminates our best line of defense against it.
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