Global Governments are Accomplices to the Corporate Raiding of Nature
The failure of COP16 showed how little governments actually care about biodiversity and habitat loss.
The Sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) ended in disarray, without so much as a basic roadmap to secure funding for biodiversity conservation. Governments had a simple yet urgent mandate: establish a financial framework to funnel $200 billion annually into biodiversity efforts, a figure that is a fraction of the $700 billion the world truly needs each year to protect ecosystems, wild species, and, ultimately, human civilization. Instead, nations scraped together a paltry $163 million in non-binding pledges and walked away from the table, leaving the world’s ecosystems and the species that rely on them one step closer to collapse.
History of the CBD
Established at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the CBD was the world’s first legally binding treaty aimed specifically at protecting biodiversity. While climate conferences like the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) focus primarily on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to the changing climate, the CBD takes a broader view. It centers on conserving…
