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RAN’s Statement on COP15

Around 1 million plant and animal species face extinction within decades. Lands, forests and waters are being destroyed or degraded at an alarming rate. Biodiversity loss is limiting our resilience and capacity to adapt to climate change and is making us more vulnerable to future pandemics. The world’s leading biodiversity scientists maintain that the only way to end the crisis is through bold, transformative change — by tackling power inequalities, injustice, and by developing inclusive decision-making, including valuing those who have best cared for nature, such as Indigenous Peoples.

Rights-holders and civil society groups are raising the alarm about corporations’ efforts to water down ambitions and side-line talks. False solutions such as fortress conservation, biodiversity offsets or calls for company self-reporting are dangerous distractions designed to defend and entrench corporate power.

The stakes are high at the 2022 Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 15) in Montréal. COP15 represents a key moment in global efforts to progress and potentially finalize a new Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). A strong GBF could put the world on a path to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, and help to tackle the intertwined climate, inequality and human rights crises. However, rights-holders and civil society groups are raising the alarm about corporations’ efforts to water down ambitions and side-line talks with empty jargon, dubious claims, junk reporting and dangerous efforts to further commodify nature.

The GBF must include a strong commitment to halt biodiversity loss. Deforestation and the conversion of natural ecosystems must stop immediately and we need to tackle the widespread use of toxic chemicals. This means an end to subsidies to harmful industries and tackling excessive consumption – which is a major driver of biodiversity loss. To achieve these changes, it is fundamental that financial flows are aligned with the goals of the GBF.

The GBF must also include strong and binding language on human rights. It must clearly outline that states must have strong, enforced laws and regulations to hold corporations — including financiers — responsible for the harms they cause to nature and people. Businesses must also be required to reduce, and ultimately end, their adverse impacts on biodiversity. The GBF must definitively recognize that we cannot protect biodiversity without shifting financial flows and require that financing is shifted to align with its goals.

False solutions such as fortress conservation, biodiversity offsets or calls for company self-reporting are dangerous distractions designed to defend and entrench corporate power, often caged in dubious claims or obscured in layers of complex jargon. Global corporations such as financial institutions and extractive industries are serial offenders when it comes to nature destruction and human rights harms. They are in no way qualified to be making recommendations.

We stand behind the Indigenous Peoples, women’s organizations, youth movements and peasant organizations who have been at the forefront of protecting and valuing all the diverse life on this planet, and driving the true solutions we need to save it. It is their voices that must be valued, amplified and prioritized at Montréal.

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