A Newsletter Covering the U.N. Climate Summit
 ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌

View this email in your browser

This is a sample of the Prospect's latest pop-up newsletter
If you want to keep receiving it, please update your preferences by
logging in to "My Account " on the
Prospect  website and clicking the "Manage Newsletters
" link.

 

 

U.S. Snubs Biodiversity Summit

The U.S. refuses to join the global conference in China on biodiversity
due to decades of pharma lobbying. Yet habitat destruction could fuel
future pandemics.

 

Tourists pass by a floral sculpture celebrating the U.N. Convention on
Biological Diversity in a park in Kunming, the host city, in
southwestern China's Yunnan province, October 2, 2021. (Chinatopix via
AP)

 

By Lee Harris

Ahead of the COP26 conference in Glasgow, activists are urging President
Joe Biden not to send climate envoy John Kerry to the United Nations
talks empty-handed
.
Less attention has gone to another global meeting on the environment,
which kicked off this week.

Countries are meeting virtually for the United Nations Convention on
Biological Diversity (CBD), the precursor to an in-person meeting in
Kunming, China, which will take place next spring. The goal is to set a
biodiversity framework to succeed prior targets, which have gone mostly
unheeded during the last decade's global extinction crisis. A "High
Ambition Coalition" led by Costa Rica, France, and the U.K. is calling
for conserving at least 30 percent of land and sea on Earth by 2030.
Other goals include more monitoring and enforcement for wildlife
trafficking, and reducing or ending human-caused extinction.

The U.S. will send a delegation, but it will have no official say in
decision-making.

That's because it is not a signatory. In 2008, as President Barack
Obama prepared to take office, activists urged him to endorse the
treaty, pointing out that only four nations in the world were not
parties to the convention: Andorra, Iraq, Somalia, and the USA
.
Since then, Andorra, Iraq, and Somalia have joined
. The U.S. is the only
major nation that remains a non-party to the CBD, which requires Senate
ratification.

"The United States strongly supports biodiversity conservation, at home
and abroad, providing more than $400 million every year to our
international partners to conserve and restore nature.  We spend
billions annually on nature conservation in the United States," a State
Department spokesperson said in a statement. "The Convention remains
before the U.S. Senate for its consent to ratification."

The United States' status as an "observer" makes it hard to
participate in discussions, said Tierra Curry, a conservation biologist
at the Center for Biological Diversity, since not all observing parties
are granted speaking time. "Seriously, it's embarrassing," she said.

The continued snub dates back to lobbying by the biopharmaceutical
industry, which objected to intellectual-property provisions and wanted
to maintain its ability to extract natural resources from developing
countries.

Read all our climate coverage here

HABITAT DESTRUCTION threatens more than the extinction of the
charismatic megafauna-panda bears, rhinos, elephants, and other cuddly
animals that are most popular stuffed. It is also a key contributor to
the emergence of infectious diseases, bringing people and livestock in
contact with wildlife
.

Around the world, humans continue to expand the wildland-urban
interface. In the past year, that encroachment set off record-breaking
fires across mismanaged land in California
and a global pandemic that
originated in China, possibly through zoonotic transmission
. The
biodiversity crisis is expected to continue driving the emergence of
diseases like COVID-19, as farming and resource extraction give
pathogens opportunities to spread to human hosts.

Following a year when conspicuous examples of the perils of biodiversity
loss came from the world's top two polluters, however, only China is
leading rhetorically on responsible land management.

On Tuesday, President Xi Jinping announced that China will put ¥1.5
billion ($232.5 million) toward a fund for developing countries to
protect biodiversity. Biden pledged last month to double funds for
climate aid to $11.4 billion per year, if he can persuade Congress, but
that money is broadly directed at the human impacts of climate change.

China, meanwhile, is eager for Kunming to be a public relations success.
China Dialogue, a news outlet that has covered the talks, has reported

"fears that China will prefer to facilitate dialogue towards

**any** agreement rather than drive ambition towards a strong one and
risk failing."

That's not an uncommon dynamic at climate talks. It was the explicit
premise of the Paris Agreement, which the U.S. and China crafted
together. U.S. leadership at the biodiversity summit would not
necessarily lead to higher commitments. But the absence of American
diplomats from Kunming is striking given the history of U.S. involvement
on biodiversity.

The U.S. helped push for a biodiversity treaty at 1992's Earth Summit
in Rio de Janeiro. But amid domestic pushback from the farm and
pharmaceutical lobbies, George H.W. Bush never signed it.

One senator, Republican Don Nickles of Oklahoma, argued that the treaty
represented "yet another attempt by the developing world to obligate the
developed world, especially the United States, to pay them to meet
environmental goals without any strings attached."

Most influential were objections from the biotech industry
,
which faced conflicting interests. On the one hand, pharmaceutical
companies had a shared stake in the preservation of global biodiversity
for research, prompting giants like Merck & Co. and the Biotechnology
Industry Organization, a trade association, to express conditional
support for ratification. But biotech firms bristled at requirements to
compensate developing nations for the genetic material used in creating
their treatments.

The Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association and Industrial
Biotechnology Association ultimately won out, arguing that the treaty
would undermine U.S. intellectual-property rights in emerging biotech.

[link removed]

THE BIODIVERSITY CRISIS is partly fueled by climate change, but it is
arguably an even more complex and intractable problem.

In 2020, the world quietly passed an uncanny threshold: Man-made mass
exceeded natural biomass
. By weight, there
are more manufactured things in the world than living bodies. That
strain is felt not only in remote preserves of Asia and South America,
but in American cities and suburbs.

In California, ancient ecosystems are being mowed down by "pyromaniacal"
grasses , as the historian Mike
Davis, an early Cassandra of pandemics, has written. The decline in
pollinators

like bees and hummingbirds makes wildflowers struggle to seed, and
threatens food security.

Populations of North American freshwater mussels are collapsing
.
To feed, they filter small particles from the water. That makes the
mollusks integral to keeping waterways clean and stabilizing complex
riverbank ecosystems, but also makes them finely sensitive to
pollutants. Eight groups of mussels were among 23 species the Fish and
Wildlife Service last month declared lost to extinction
.

The Amazon rain forest has been touted as a global carbon sink, sucking
up emissions to compensate for pollution elsewhere. But logging, mining,
and clearing land to grow animal feed has turned the "lungs of the
world" into a net emitter of greenhouse gases
.
Beyond Brazil, climate change itself could undermine forests' ability
to mitigate climate change
.

Whereas global warming can more easily be boiled down to a couple of
metrics-the price of carbon, degrees of heating-there's no single
unit for measuring biodiversity. The number of extinct species, total
biomass, coverage of protected areas-each only tells part of the
story.

The biodiversity crisis could be an even thornier problem of political
economy. With climate change, the fossil fuel industry is an easily
identifiable villain, whereas with biodiversity loss, culprits are more
distributed, said Li Shuo, a climate campaigner with Greenpeace China.
They include urbanization, wildlife trafficking, and general
environmental pollution.

Governments are now pitching green initiatives as a business-friendly
"energy transition," affording investment opportunities in
electrification. Those may curb greenhouse gas emissions, but they rely
on continuing our highly intense pace of resource extraction (and
sometimes accelerating it, as with lithium mining

for electric vehicles). Green growth that preserves biodiversity is a
harder sell than a profitable clean-energy transition.

[link removed]

XI'S TUESDAY PLEDGE to fund biodiversity in developing countries comes
as China attempts to improve its image as a climate villain.

Chinese railways, roads, and power plants built in Africa and Southeast
Asia have intruded on ecologically sensitive areas and indigenous lands
,
researchers at Boston University found last month in a study of
development projects financed by two Chinese policy banks
between 2008 and
2019. China recently pledged to stop financing coal power plants abroad,
though it will not halt ecologically intrusive development.

Biden has proposed to counter the Belt and Road Initiative, China's
infrastructure development agenda, with a "Build Back Better World"
partnership recently announced by G7 countries. It pledges
"climate-friendly" investments abroad, though details are scarce. The
U.S. International Development Finance Corporation is a more fleshed-out
new attempt to meet foreign-policy objectives through development
financing
.

Li, of Greenpeace, said the United States' system of national parks is
enviable. Domestically, he would like to see land set aside for
conservation, particularly in ecologically rich regions like Yunnan, but
progress has been slow, given perceived trade-offs between development
and conservation.

"A hundred years ago, you [in America] had political elites who were
just genuinely interested in conservation. What they did back then
helped you to preserve a large part of nature in your country, so that
it did not suffer from the subsequent economic development," Li said.
"We very much followed, unfortunately, the pollution first and
protection later approach."

Li is less optimistic about either country's present-day will to curb
biodiversity loss. Even the Build Back Better bill, the Democrats'
major legislative push for climate, contains new spending on roads and
airports alongside its clean-energy provisions, Li pointed out.

"The American view when the Chinese talk about infrastructure
development is, 'This is all about high-carbon pollution, roads and
bridges.' And when the U.S. builds the same infrastructure projects,
it is somehow packaged as green.'"

Lee Harris is a writing fellow at The American Prospect.

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

The American Prospect
IDEAS, POLITICS & POWER
The American Prospect, Inc.
1225 I Street NW, Suite 600
Washington, DC xxxxxx
United States
Copyright (C) 2021 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.

To opt out of American Prospect membership messaging, click here
.

To manage your newsletter preferences, click here
.

To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters,
click here
.