United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 3

Delegates from 196 countries — Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) — are meeting in Montreal, Canada from December 7-21 with the aim to hammer out a new global agreement on halting environmental loss.

• Many of the 24 conservation targets under discussion at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP15) aim to avoid past mistakes and improve on the world’s last set of conservation goals — the Aichi Biodiversity Targets that expired in 2020. 
• No single country met all 20 Aichi Targets within its own borders, according to a September 2020 UN assessment.

What were the Aichi Targets?

• The Aichi Targets, adopted during the 2010 CBD summit in Nagoya, located in Japan’s Aichi prefecture, included goals such as reducing deforestation by at least half during the coming decade and curbing pollution so that it no longer harmed ecosystems.
• India is also a party to the Convention.
• The convention is legally binding on its signatories.
• Only two member states of the United Nations are not Parties to the CBD, namely: the USA and the Vatican.
• The most notable Aichi objective and one of the few to include a numerical goal — aimed to protect or conserve 17% of all land and inland waters and 10% of the ocean by the end of the decade.
• Today about 15% of the world’s land and 8% of ocean territories are under some form of protection, though the level of protection varies.
• About 10% of the targets saw no significant progress, the assessment found. 
• Six of the targets, including the land and ocean conservation target, were deemed “partially achieved”.
• The Global Environment Facility, the primary source of financing for international biodiversity protection, has collected around $5 billion from 29 countries for the funding period from 2022 to 2026.
• The Aichi Targets also failed to garner buy-in from governments beyond the environmental ministers who brokered the deal.

Reasons for the failure of Aichi Targets

• A lack of clearly defined metrics by which to gauge progress made the Aichi goals tough to implement, experts say.
• Aichi was made of aspirational targets, which was great for…enabling people to do a lot, but not great for communication.

Global Environment Facility

• The GEF was established in 1991 by the World Bank in consultation with UNDP and UNEP, to provide funding to protect the global environment. 
• World Bank serves as the GEF trustee, administering the fund.
• GEF Funds are available to developing countries and countries with economies in transition to meet the objectives of the international environmental conventions and agreements.

GEF serves as a “financial mechanism” to five Conventions:

• Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
• United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
• Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs)
• UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)
• Minamata Convention on Mercury.

Question: What were the Aichi Targets? Give the reasons countries could not achieved their target under it.