EU claims to be ‘on track’ with global biodiversity pledge

The European Commission’s proposal to delay implementation of the Deforestation Regulation will not undermine the EU’s position in upcoming UN biodiversity talks, its lead negotiator has claimed, saying the postponement was a recognition that further preparatory work with trading partners was needed.

The 16th conference of parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in the Colombian city of Cali later this month will be the first since the landmark COP15 in Montreal two years ago that yielded a Global Biodiversity Framework, an agreement to place 30% of land and sea under conservation status and begin restoring 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030.

But less than three weeks ahead of the meeting, environmental groups were outraged when the EU yielded to pressure from business groups and trading partners – notably the US and Brazil –  calling for a delay to the law, which requires proof that no forests were cleared in the production of a range of goods from coffee to beef and timber in exchange for access to the EU market.

“What you’ve seen today is a recognition of the fact that more work in collaboration with partners is needed to make sure this regulation actually has the desired impact,” said Hugo Schally, who heads the EU’s negotiating team, just hours after the Commission announced the postponement on Wednesday.

“With regard to our credibility, one thing I would like to point out is that that we are – with regard to our overall work programme related to nature and biodiversity – on track,” Schally said at a discussion in Brussels, pointing to the entry into force last month of the hotly debated Nature Restoration Law.

“I think that [law] will demonstrate that we are ready to do at the European level what we hope everybody will do at the global level in achieving the targets of the global biodiversity framework,” the EU official added.

After facing further criticism Thursday over the decision to postpone the deforestation law while briefing members of the European Parliament’s environment committee, Schally said: “Make no mistake, the delay…does not change [any of the] fundamental obligations.”

The adoption of the Nature Restoration Law had been “watched very carefully” across the globe,” Schally noted. “If we had not adopted it, we would have lost much of our credibility internationally,” he told MEPs.

Speakers at yesterday’s event hosted by the United Nations, European Commission and Colombian diplomats, stressed the inextricable link between biodiversity loss and climate changewhich is the subject of a different UN ‘COP’, the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November.

Colombia – which wants to push biodiversity up the global agenda alongside climate – is expecting a dozen heads of state, among them Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and over a hundred environment ministers to attend the summit, which it has designated as an opportunity for the world to make “peace with nature”.

A key issue for this year’s biodiversity COP president is the fair sharing of the benefits of genetic resources, specifically the digital sequence information of plants in biodiverse ecosystems that could have applications in biotechnology and medicine, said Camila Polo Florez, Colombia’s chargé d’affaires in Brussels.

Florez pointed to a partnership launched by Colombia and Germany at the last summit in December 2022 that aims to help developing countries implement the National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAP) that parties to the global framework have to elaborate and now counts France, Spain, Canada and China among its members.

The issue of finance will, as in the parallel climate negotiations, be a thorny but central issue in Cali. Under the GBF, resources provided by developed to developing countries must reach $20 billion per year by 2025 and $30 billion by 2030.

In a video message to the event, the head of the Commission’s environment directorate, Florika Fink-Hooijer, said the EU was ready to pay its share. “We are keeping to our commitment to double external financing for biodiversity,” she said, referring to a decision dating from a year before the Montreal agreement to stump up €7 billion of the EU’s 2021-2027 budget.