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.

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.

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.

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.’"