COP15 in Montreal: UN calls for biodiversity ‘peace pact with nature’

Governments are meeting in Montreal to agree targets to reverse the loss of nature.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said we have a chance to stop the “orgy of destruction” which has put a million species at risk of extinction.

“It’s time to forge a peace pact with nature,” he added.

Biodiversity is the sum of all living things on the planet and the way they are connected in a complex web of life that we rely upon for food, clean air and water.

In Montreal nearly 200 countries will try to agree on a way to put the world on a path to restoring nature by the end of the decade.

The stakes are high with the COP15 UN summit seen as a chance to do for biodiversity what the Paris agreement has done for the fight against climate change.

The two issues are intertwined, with warnings that a failure to secure a good outcome on protecting nature will make it far harder to fight climate change.

“The idea of biodiversity can be quite complicated for people, but it’s basically about nature,” said Dr Abigail Entwistle of conservation charity Fauna and Flora International. 

“We’ve not been as good at getting the message across about what’s at stake and how urgent the situation is and we need to have our 1.5 degree moment for biodiversity in the same way we have for climate change.”

Several issues threaten to derail the talks including financing of the plans and debate over how to protect the natural world without risking creating “paper parks” or “ghost forests” that are protected only on paper and from which indigenous people and local communities are excluded.

Cambodia Country Director for Fauna and Flora International, Pablo Sinovas, pointed to the need for better protection of areas of the world with undiscovered biodiversity, such as in the country’s Virachey National Park.

“You could say this forest area is the equivalent of the Amazon of Asia,” he said. 

“It is a very large forest with outstanding biodiversity – there is much to be explored and much to be discovered, yet unlike the Amazon, it hasn’t received that much attention.”