Treasurer Chalmers should have attended the biodiversity COP16
Oct 26, 2024
The world’s biodiversity crisis gathers pace and any effective action depends on the reduction of economic growth. High-level leadership is needed to explain the fundamental conflict between economic growth and biodiversity conservation which threatens humanity possibly sooner than the ravages of climate change.
COP16 on biodiversity commenced on October 21 with the role to explain the overlooked, fundamental conflict between economic growth, over-population, and biodiversity conservation. This is the greatest issue to beset humanity along with climate change which must be regarded as the other side of the coin.
The goal of the parties at COP16 is to develop the strategies to achieve the 23 targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which was adopted at COP15. The framework gets its name from the fact that COP15 was chaired by China but, in the latter stages of the Covid pandemic, was hosted by Canada. The highlight of the framework was the “30 by 30” goal of conserving 30% of lands and seas for biodiversity purposes by 2030.
There have been many criticisms of the 30 x 30 framework and just prior to COP16 only 31 out of 195 countries had filed their national biodiversity plan to COP16 on the progress of their goal. This is not encouraging.
Of the 23 Targets decided at COP 15 only number 14 “Integrate Biodiversity in Decision-Making at Every Level” is of relevance to economic growth as the cause of biodiversity destruction. Disappointingly the words “economic growth” are not mentioned in the document.
Climate will continue to have extensive coverage in the world media but biodiversity and COP16 will be largely ignored particularly in US and Australian major media outlets. Our two nations are birds of a feather, preening themselves that they have the wisdom to continue growth in their GDP. The US does not attend biodiversity COPs; it is the only absent nation. Australia has the courage to attend despite its appalling environmental record.
The founding President of the Centre for the Enhancement of the Steady State Economy, (CASSE) Professor Brian Czech has written a Primer on Economic Growth and Biodiversity for the COP16 meeting. I write this to encourage you to read his article on an alternative economy and particularly the section “Causes of Endangerment” of biodiversity — quite simply the cause is The Economy.
Brian Czech writes “Most of us involved in conservation biology, ecological economics, and sustainability-science are convinced that we—8 billion of us with a GDP well over $100 trillion—have already done just that: breached our carrying capacity. Such a breach can only be short-term, by definition. We are living on borrowed time, able to do so by liquidating stocks of natural capital including fossil fuels, forests, and fisheries. We either figure out how to move toward a steady state economy at a sustainable size soon, or we will be thrust into environmental and economic chaos”.
At this biodiversity COP we need diplomats, technocrats, scientists together with a level of leadership not seen before to commence a change in economic policy to a steady state economy. It seems impossible to change current entrenched positions.
The call for leadership has been recurrent. In 2021 Bradshaw, Ehrlich and colleagues in their paper ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’ reviewed major and confronting environmental issues that had received little attention and required urgent action.
They reviewed the evidence that future environmental conditions will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its life-forms—including humanity was in fact so great that it was difficult to grasp by even well-informed experts. They asked what political or economic system or leadership was prepared to handle the predicted disasters, or even capable of such action.
The Australian Land Conservation Alliance (ALCA) will attend COP 16 with representatives from the Australian Government environment sector. No ministers have been announced. ALCA has produced a guide.
When one reflects on the three greatest survival issues for humanity, preservation of environment, climate change and geopolitical peace, the former is judged by many to be the most crucial and the one where Australia can influence its own destiny by arresting the deterioration of our environment.
A major problem is the lack of environmental education of our elected representatives and governments who then fail to educate their electors in urgently needed environmental action.
It is a pity that our Prime Minister could not attend COP16 instead of Samoa where he will be symbolising all that Australia is not doing for climate change. Indeed all world leaders should be at COP, but our most important representative would not be Anthony Albanese, it would be Treasurer Jim Chalmers – to commence his learning curve and face his future responsibilities.