Biopiracy, NBSAPs and nature burnout at COP16

While watching DreamWorks’ new sci-fi survival movie, The Wild Robot, with my two young children the other day, I was struck by the mixed messages it was giving out. Advanced technology (AI in combination with robotics) has the capacity either to save the planet from burning up/freezing over, resulting in mass extinction, or accelerate its destruction. Only by learning from natural ecosystems and overwriting her coding can our aluminium heroine Roz, save the animal population of her island (and by extrapolation, the entire planet). Ultimately, she must return to the mother ship/profit-driven corporation that made her and transform it from within. Spoiler alert: the movie conveniently ends before we are shown how she achieves this.

As COP16 (the world’s nature COP) draws to a close this week in Cali, Columbia, the unmissable message is one of systemic failure due to lack of funding. Agreements have been stymied by the lack of capital to fund conservation, as the 196 participating nations pledged millions rather than the billions of dollars that are needed to stave off biodiversity collapse

Preceding the conference, WWF issued a report warning that “Nature is on the brink of burnout,” with wildlife population sizes decline by 73% in 50 years. We are “dangerously close to irreversible global tipping points” that are a direct threat to survival, such as the melting of polar ice sheets and decline of the Amazon rainforest (which since 2021 has been emitting more carbon dioxide than it is able to absorb).

The lack of progress since COP15, when 200-odd nations signed up to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, is frankly depressing. Only 20% of countries who signed up to that ‘30x30 pledge’ to protect 30% of the planet’s lands, oceans and waters by 2030, have subsequently presented their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs).

And designating “protected areas” is only part of the challenge because that in itself doesn’t conserve ecosystems, as a new study from the Natural History Museum shows. In fact, biodiversity is declining faster in protected areas, partly due to “feedback loops” or knock-on effects when ecosystems start to collapse – as the devastating wild bushfires in the DRC illustrate.

Meanwhile, here in England’s ‘green and pleasant land’, nature is in just as much jeopardy as it is in the global south, says The State of Natural Capital Report 2024, released in time for COP16. The key takeouts of this report are: 1) The degraded state of England’s natural capital is a severe risk to the economy and society; 2) Nature has been missing from decision-making across all sectors and cannot be uncoupled from the climate crisis; 3) We need to invest in natural capital urgently, to reduce the risk of further collapse. As Tony Juniper, chair of Nature England, puts it: “Tackling the nature crisis will require action across all sectors to reduce risks to society.”

Back to a mountainside in Cali, some $200,163 million of the $700 Bn that’s estimated we need to stop the decline by 2030 has been committed (an additional $163 million was pledged on Monday, the summit's “finance day”) - but that’s still a yawning gap.

There has been a lot of talk about bridging that gap by getting pharmaceutical companies to pay in compensation for the “biopiracy” they’ve been practicing by raiding the natural world for remedies and cures that they’ve patented and profited hugely from. The same logic might also be applied to the extractive industries and manufacturing, as nature economists struggle to find enormous sums ‘behind the sofa’.

The finance for nature must be found somewhere, because, as the UN Secretary General puts it, “For humanity to survive, nature must flourish.”  Or to put it in Hollywood terms, without nature, there is no “us” – just a bunch of purposeless robots.