A plan to slow the biggest loss of life since the dinosaurs

The past few months have seen the signing of two major international treaties designed to safeguard biodiversity. At COP15 in December, world leaders?agreed on a framework?to protect 30% of all land, waters and oceans by 2030. Weeks later,?an agreement was reached?on the language of a United Nations treaty to preserve marine biodiversity in the 60% of the ocean beyond any nation’s jurisdiction.

What remains to be seen is how effective these treaties will be, especially because the US — the world’s largest economy —?isn’t a party to either.?

“Do I wish we were a member of the convention? Sure,” says Monica Medina, the US special envoy to COP15, on this week’s episode of the Zero podcast, adding that US President Joe Biden has “said we want to achieve 30 by 30. I also know he said we want to help other countries do the same,” she notes.?

You can listen to the episode on biodiversity below, and?read a full transcript here. Subscribe to?Zero?on?Apple,?Spotify?and?Google?to hear new episodes every Thursday.

Then there’s the question of who will fund the programs needed to meet that 30 by 30 goal. Many of the most important sites for conservation are located in the world’s poorer countries, and as it stands only 17% of the world’s land and 10% of its marine areas are protected.?

That tension was at the center of the COP15 talks in Montreal, which came close to breaking down before wealthier nations promised to allocate roughly $30 billion annually by 2030 to help poorer nations fund biodiversity initiatives. (A similar pledge, made in 2009 to supply poorer countries with $100 billion annually by 2020 to help them deal with the impacts of climate change, has yet to be met.) Medina says there’s also more work to be done with private-sector donors.?

While both treaties represent a growing global commitment to conservation and protecting biodiversity across environments, WWF Chief Scientist Rebecca Shaw also has a word of caution: To be effective, the process needs to be inclusive of the people who actually live in the most biodiverse areas.?

Biodiversity protection cannot “just be a purview of nations or of other actors,” Shaw says. It must take into?“account in an equitable and respectful way, what indigenous peoples and local communities are delivering.”