The high season is not just a poetic phrase but a legal designation. Anything two hundred miles off the coast of a country is not subject to any specific laws or In the United Nations lingo, they're called an area beyond national jurisdiction. That's nearly half the Earth's surface, by the way, and until recently, there was no legal route to protect marine life there. But in March, after nearly two decades of negotiations, delegates at a UN meeting agreed
on a pathway to protect these areas. This came only months after a big UN agreement signed in Montreal at COP fifteen that, among other goals, aims to protect thirty percent of nature by twenty thirty. It feels good to hear about this progress, but is only seven years away. So it's worth asking how will all of these pledges come to fruition and where exactly are we starting from.
To answer these questions, I have three guests today. I'm speaking of Rebecca Shaw, chief scientist at the World Wildlife Fund, about how something as broad as biodiversity is measured and what the stakes are. Then I'll speak with Monica Medina of the US State Department about what can be accomplished when the US is not a party to either of
these treaties. But first, I'm joined by my colleague Eric Roston, who attended COP fifteen in Montreal, to talk through the backstory, because it feels like all this progress happened overnight, two major agreements in four months, but there's more to it than that. Eric, Welcome to the show.
Hi, thanks for having me.
Now let's start with the basics. What is biodiversity because it feels like it's an all encompassing term, like planet or life.
It's a great question. It does seem like one of these words that means everything. And it comes out of a nineteen ninety two UN treaty called the Convention on Biological Diversity that set in place a formal UN process by which countries that sign the agreement meet every two years and figure out, just like you said, how to protect more nature. But it is a real grab bag. Biodiversity is not like climate change in a number of ways. It is, at least on the most superficial level, much
more complicated. Climate change is just about basically one number. It's like how much CO two is in the atmosphere. Biodiversity it's much harder to pin down the metrics for biodiversity. There's a lot of them.
So this big agreement that was signed in Montreal was under the Convention on Biological Diversity, which is thirty years old a little more than that. Why is it that suddenly we have a agreement that aims to protect thirty percent of the planet.
Part of it is coincidence. This Convention on Biological Diversity had a really big year in twenty ten, and well, that feels like a long time ago. What they did was they set up some very ambitious goals for protecting nature by twenty twenty, and they failed practically on every mark. So by the time twenty twenty rolls around, it was time for another big round of commitments. COVID happened and
the meeting was postponed for a couple of years. So the Kunming Montreal meeting in December is the result of a two year wait to find successor goals to the ones they failed to meet from twenty ten.
If they failed spectacularly on the twenty ten goals, what makes it possible to set a new goal that is even more ambitious and why would they be able to achieve it this time? Around.
You put it that way, it really does start to sound like the conventional jokey definition of insanity. But a lot has changed. One of them is the problem just keeps getting worse. Animal populations across ecosystems around the world have fallen by seventy percent since nineteen seventy. Now there's other things that are very important too, and one of them is private sector and government awareness of this problem.
What's really unique about what's happening these days is that parts of the private sector are very, very invested in this. They have learned a lot from climate change. By that, I mean they have learned about risks that they face to their supply change, to their raw materials, to their reputations. Messing up this topic, in addition to being just morally horrifying,
could impede their ability to get investment or even operate. So, just as you know, in the last ten years, we've seen the rise of the Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures, which is a body to help companies understand and express their risks they face from climate change. There is now a Task Force on Nature Related Financial Disclosures.
So the Biodiversity Group has really just been cutting and pasting a lot of the successful climate initiatives, and what that's doing is making the very important discussion of measuring in metrics much more nimble. So it's a confluence of a lot of different things that are bringing this all to a head in the last year.
My next guest is Rebecca Shaw, who is the chief scientist at the World Wildlife Fund, an organization that plays an important role in our understanding of biodiversity. Every two years, Rebecca's team publishes a report called the LPI, or the Living Planet Index. The most recent one shows a sixty nine percent decline in monitored vertebrate species since nineteen seventy. Restoring biodiversity is a goal in its own right, and
it can also have positive impacts for the climate. I wanted to hear from Rebecca about the significance of these un agreements and how they actually can be implemented. My first question to Rebecca was simply, how have you seen the biodiversity crisis play out in your lifetime?
Well, in my backyard it would be the monarch butterfly, which not very far from my home used to have a forest where it would come and overwinter, the entire eucalyptus forest would turn orange. There were so many butterflies. But with the increase in pesticize use and the decline in milkweed abundance because of that herbicide use, they just don't exist anymore. In fact, they barely come to the eucalyptus forest anymore, and they come one or two at a time, and not hundreds of thousands at a time
like they used to. Certainly, as a scientist, I've been watching all the indices that track biodiversity, both at the national level and the local level, and of course globally decline and decline by a lot. On a personal level, you can really see this in your daily life in ways that make it a little bit more tangible. No more bugs hitting your windshield, You aren't seeing as many birds in the spring as you used to. Maybe the
same bird, just not as many. And of course it's harder and harder if you like to go fishing, it's harder and harder to find those places to go fishing.
And because scientists like to measure things, what are top line metrics that you use to keep a track of biodiversity laws?
First, just to back up a little bit, biodiversity has lots of metrics to track it because there's lots of aspects of biodiversity that are really important to people. Sometimes we track genetic diversity because we really care about the fact that there's lots of different genetics out there to be used for medicines and such. Sometimes we track species diversity, which is how is this particular animal doing versus this animal, And we tracked populations of species across the planet, and
how are ecosystems doing? And then all the benefits that people derived from ecosystems, like clean air, clean water, we
track that as well. And so one of the ones that we track is the LPI, the Living Planet Index, which is one that tracks populations of animals thirty two thousand populations of over five thousand species globally, and we've seen sixty nine percent decline in these populations of animals mammals, fishes, birds, amphibians, and reptiles across the globe, which really is an indicator that ecosystem health is declining and that nature is unraveling.
When I think of the overlap of biodiversity and climate change, the obvious link to me is forests. The more trees there are the more carbon is drawn down out of the atmosphere, and that reduces the impact that Greno's gases can have on the planet. But what are some of the less common examples of how biodiverse ecosystems maintain the climate.
There's lots of good examples, but I think the one that really sparked my imagination, really made me start to think differently about diversity and its connection to ecosystem function and the things that we really need from ecosystems is that the loss of certain kinds of animals in a forest can lead to a decline in carbon stored in
those tropical forests. There is a study in the Atlantic Forests of Brazil which looked at what was happening to the forest with the two thousand tree species in the forest and then the eight hundred animal species when the forest started losing its large fruit eating animals such as tapers, two can, golden lion, tamarinds due to hunting, illegal trade, and habitat loss. And what was happening is that we're losing the dispersal of the large seeded trees and therefore
the composition of the tropical forest was changing dramatically. Now the impact of that is really not intuitive. The result is it became dominated by smaller trees with softer woods that stored less carbon. So you lose the species from hunting in illegal trade, and over time you begin to
lose the carbon storing function of that forest. There's still small fruit eating animals that are not targeted by hunters and by poachers, small birds and bats and so on, and they continue to sperse small seeds, but those small seeds are associated with small trees that actually don't store
as much carbon. And when the researchers looked at what is the impact of that mechanism across the world, they found that the force in Africa, the Americas, and in South Asia, which have high proportions of the animal dispersed tree species, consistently show carbon losses as high as twelve percent. And that's just one non intuitive mechanism about the way biodiversity promotes and sustains carbon storage. And I'm sure there are others out there that we are not yet aware of.
So killing some of these large animals that eat particular types of fruit in their seeds is changing the entire structure of the forest and even shrinking its ability to act as the common saying that it was before the hunting and the legal trade began.
That's right. You pull one kind of animal out of that and that changes the dynamics of the system and how the system can produce benefits for humans.
This is a crisis that we need to deal with. It is something that has been less talked about, certainly than the climate crisis, but they overlap. And delegates from over one hundred countries met in Montreal in December at the COP fifteen event trying to discuss global biodiversity framework that would set goals to try and undo some of the damage that we are causing. What happened in December in Montreal.
Yeah, delegates from all over the globe met in Montreal to discuss what are we going to do about this biodiversity crisis, and they came up with a Global Biodiversity Framework which has for arching global goals conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of the components of biological diversity, fair and equitable sharing of the benefits of genetic resources, and the delivery of adequate resources for implementation. He also had twenty
three targets. The most important of all the targets and the one that you probably heard the most about was the thirty by thirty, and the thirty by thirty just essentially means is that we will protect, conserve, and manage for biodiversity thirty percent of all the land and water, so freshwater and oceans by twenty thirty, on our way to a twenty to fifty goal where they will be conserved effectively and up to fifty percent.
So thirty by thirty and then fifty by fifty.
That's right, and achieving the start is going to require a doubling of the extent of trustraal area protected and conserved areas and a quadrupling of the marine areas designate for conservation while ensuring their effective management. So this is not a small goal and almost two hundred nations around the globe agreed to this. I think that is a phenomenal outcome and is a big win for biodiversity.
So, according to the Protected Planet Report, currently about seventeen percent of the world's land is protected and eight percent of ocean is protected. What does protected count for?
Definitely in conservation in the past we've been thinking about you take lands or waters and you set up aside from human use, and action, and we've definitely found out that that is not a way to effectively conserve the resources we need to conserve to protect biodiversity over time.
What we really need to do is better understand how to manage different types of uses along a landscape, along a spectrum from highly intensive uses to less intensive uses that allow for biodiversity to thrive and to deliver the services that benefit societies around the globe. We have seventeen percent protected in the terrestrial it doesn't mean they're effectively protected,
so it's really important that we go after that. Effective protection and conserved is a whole lot more nuanced than protected. It means you can have certain activities like the harvesting of certain animals or plants at a certain rate that allow for the system to stay intact. You can have of people living within those conserved areas and managing the systems like lots of indigenous and local communities around the
globe do. And it also means that you manage them actively to get the outcomes in biodiversity and biodiversity benefits
that you're looking for. And so conserved and protected can take a lot of different shapes, and I think it's a diversity of mechanisms for delivering on the Biodiversity framework, that is really one of its deep strengths because it then recognizes and comes to terms with different types of communities around the globe are going to have innovations to bring to the table that will work within their cultures.
And all of this will require some level of conservation. But conservation has a history of excluding people from areas that are theirs. Good example is the Yellowstone National Park, a thing of beauty, but that was founded by forcibly removing Indigenous people of their land. So are there examples that you know off places that have been conserved in an inclusive way? And what is it that you've learned from those areas that could be applied to other areas.
Yeah, one of the targets in the Global Biodiversity Framework is that all of these efforts be taken in a way that are inclusive and equitable, and particularly inclusive and
equitable with respect to indigenous peoples and local communities. And there have been studies just in the past five years, another real advancement in our understanding of conservation on the globe that have shown that in many ways, the lands and the waters that are managed by indigenous peoples and local communities have greater biodiversity, deliver greater resources with greater certainty over time than those areas which are managed more extractively.
And so we have seen it's in the Amazon and in parts of the Congo and other places where communal activity, activity that manages it for the long term benefit for multiple generations, can have real biodiversity benefits and real climate benefits.
And I think that the importance of moving forward with the Global Biodiversity Framework and the nature based solutions under the Climate Convention is that we are going to places, working with those communities to make sure that their values are respected, that they get the resources they need, and that it not just be a purview of nations or of other actors making these things happen, but really taking into account in an equitable and a respectful way, what
indigenous peoples and local communities are delivering.
Climate change forces some areas of the world to go through transitions that are going to mean that some children will grow up without ever seeing snow in their own backyards when their parents did. And these are just difficult things to tell young people when they haven't seen something that was beautiful and is now gone. What is your best method of being able to talk to young people about biodiversity laws.
Really, for every disaster story or crisis story, when you see these kind of slow declining losses over time, we call them shifting baselines. So if you're born in nineteen seventy, you have a really different baseline than if you're born in nineteen ninety or twenty ten, and it's that baseline is what you expect of the world. So if you come to the world and you've never seen a monarch butterfly, you don't expect it, and why would you work to
have it. The important thing about both climate and biodiversity crisis being connected together and getting the kind of platform that they both have. Right now, there's so many people demanding that we have a stable climate and that we be able to return some of those populations of species back to the communities where they persisted for so long. We're definitely seeing that with a monarch butterfly, and we're seeing it with different kinds of species and different kinds
of ecosystems and habitats around the world. We've seen the mountain gorilla in Rwanda is increasing because the community is focused on increasing that population because they benefit from it. So I think it's really important to young people to understand that, yes, we're seeing these declines. Yes it's bad. Yes some of them we won't be able to retrieve again, but so much of it we can retrieve and restore and sustain if we do things fundamentally differently, And they're
a part of the innovation to make that happen. I've been working on bi diversity and climate for thirty years. It used to be I knew almost ever a beddy working on it because they were all scientists and we all went to the same meetings and we all talk to each other. Now I couldn't possibly know everybody working in these two areas anymore because they're in every single kind of discipline, every sector of the economy, everywhere around
the planet. And so I think there's a lot of hope, but it's hoped that it has to be paired with action.
That was a great conversation. Thank you, Rebecca, Thank you Acshaut.
I'm really pleased to have had a chance to spend time with you today.
After the break. How is the US contributing to biodiversity protection? I speak with Munka Medina, the US Special envoy to COP fifteen to find out. Before the break, we heard from rebeccah Shaw about her optimism, but there are thorny issues. Who will fund all this biodiversity protection, especially in developing countries where most of the biodiversity that we can preserve exists. This is something my colleague Eric Rosston has been looking into.
What do experts say about where the Global Biodiversity Framework falls shot.
The central issue is money, and it's almost always the central issue. I was at the Global Biodiversity Talks in Montreal in December, and I don't want to demean it by calling it a script, but like there are patterns to these negotiations, and developing countries trying to get the most financial aid they can to accomplish these ambitious goals is a really powerful hallmark. The other side is just
trying to define these very large goals. The Biodiversity COP was not a place where you go and haggle over which hector of Land is going to get this technique versus that technique versus that sum of money. It's a place where the highest level goals and ambitions are really set down in stone and so it's really a lot of is very idea driven.
Is that a problem though? I mean in some way. The Paris Agreement, which was signed on by again all countries in twenty five, was barely twelve pages long and was essentially a bunch of ideas which have taken the last eight years to be put into real, detailed legal wording of how things will actually play out. So do we see the Global Biodiversity Framework signed on in Montreal as a starting point?
Absolutely, this is another consensus driven enterprise, and by definition that means there had to be heavy negotiations and compromises all around. The flip side of that observation, though, is that when you have two hundred nations agreeing on something, whatever it is, that becomes an extremely potent document. And
that potency is clear. It's clear from the agreement reached in Montreal that this is a priority now for everyone, and the private sector is listening and individual countries are listening. As a long time observed of various un processes, there is something deeply fundamental and central about soft power. It's not like somebody at a cop signs something and then agencies around the world execute new kinds of jobs the
next day. It is this very powerful, undulating, wavelike stream of influence that emanates from successful negotiations like this, and it is that very fuzzy but critical soft power that is what in turn causes people in governments, people in boardrooms, people at institutional investors to interpret whatever the agreement is for themselves and execute new ways of doing business.
The US did not sign this momentous agreement because the US cannot sign this agreement. The United States is not party to the Convention on Biological Diversity that was created in nineteen ninety two. However, the Biden administration and chose to be involved in this meeting regardless. I had the opportunity to speak with Monica Medina, who's the US special vote to the talks. I wanted to hear from her about what the US can actually do now that it's
subjected to this fuzzy but critical soft power that Eric described. Monica, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Thank you very much for talking about this important topic.
Now.
US is just one of two countries that is not a part of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. The other country is the Vatican. What were you able to achieve without being a party to the convention at the COP fifteen meeting.
Well, we were able to achieve an awful lot because we worked in concert with many of the governments who are parties. We worked through them and with them to achieve the thirty x thirty framework, which had been our
goal for a long time. The Biden administration fully supports that framework, and in fact, the President himself made a promise that we would try to achieve that thirty percent of lands and waters and the ocean protected by twenty thirty goal ourselves domestically, and that we would help other countries do the same. So we had always been fully committed to the aims of the convention, and particularly because we are one of the largest funder of biodiversity in
the world. At Biodiversity Conservation, we had I think a big voice that gave us an opportunity to talk about the work that we could do through our contribution to the Global Environment Facility and through our work related to climate change and nature and biodiversity.
As the world's largest economy, the US also has impacts outside its own borders. Take beef. The US is the world's largest consumer of beef and cattle grazing takes a huge amount of land, both in the US and abroad from where the US imports beef. Do you think there need to be constraints put on the amount of beef people can consume it if we are to reach these golds?
Well, I don't want to take away anybody's hamburger. They're Cheeseburgers are delicious, But we do understand. I mean, I think there are several things we need to think about. One of the other things that we are doing in the US and other countries are doing are looking at the ways that our own consumption patterns and our trade
patterns might be actually driving deforestation in other countries. So we're trying to account for that and figure out, Okay, are there policy changes that we can make that help to mitigate or to minimize that kind of thing, And we and other developed nations are looking at that now. The EU has just done a similar study. The other thing I think we need to think about as a
planet is food waste. You know, we waste an awful lot of food in this world, and if we could do less of that, we would have less methane escaping into the atmosphere from landfills in all of these areas. I think we have to really work hard to cut down the amount of things that we just dispose of the way. We don't think about how much the footprint we have on the planet for using resources and then disposing of them without thinking about the waste that we're causing.
There was a lot of parallel being drawn between trying to tackle the climate crisis and tackle the biodiversity crisis, to the extent where many called what happened in Montreal the Paris Agreement for Nature, and the parallels do work to some extent. One very good example is the Paris Agreement is very clear on transferring sums of money from rich countries to developing countries to help them meet these goals.
Because developed countries have for centuries exploited their natural resources but also the natural resources of colonies or other countries and have gotten rich on the back of that. Now developing countries are in the position of being able to use those resources for their own development, but are now
being restricted by these necessary global agreements. So what is it that the Biden administration is doing to actually transfer money to developing countries to help them with biodiversity goals.
Well, I will say I was at both cops and I think we saw at the Biodiversity cop a real effort by the Global Environment Facility, which is the main funder of biodiversity per se in the world, the main multilateral development bank, promised to change the way it does business in order to make it easier for those countries who have so much biodiversity to be able to get funding to keep it in place and not have it be developed. So I think that was a really important experience.
What the US government is doing is funding biodiversity. We have huge programs at USAID that do biodiversity work in countries that are really in sore need of it. Just this past year increased dramatically our contribution to the Global Environment Facility, and we are the single largest contributor to the Global Environment Facility, which helps many organizations secretariats that
do the work on a day to day basis. And we tagged half of our contribution to biodiversity and nature, so we kind of earmarked it, if you will, so
that it will be used for biodiversity and conservation. But on top of that, I think we have to be pushing for private sector donors, and we need to leverage great projects in the right places because we know that there are some parts of the world whose biodiversity is still relatively intact, and we need to keep it that way, and we need to make it worth their while to keep it that way.
And it certainly sounds great that the US is the largest contributor to the global environment facility, but we have to remember the context here, which is the US is the largest economy in the world, and it has to be the largest contributor to these funds. What the US tends to fail at, which is true certainly in the Climate Fund, is that it doesn't even reach its potential off how much it needs to contribute towards those funds. So the Climate Fund, the US needed to contribute as
much as forty billion dollars. It's not even gotten close to the eleven billion dollars that the Biden administration wants from Congress. So there's a long way to go in making equity work in both climate and nature. What is it that you have to do internally for the politics to align so that funds can be given to developing countries.
Well, I think we need to actually help create this understanding in our Congress of how important biodiversity and nature is, and we need to look for those co benefits. We have I think a lot of good support there, but we need to keep going. I don't rest, I really I get up every day trying to think about how can I do more? What more can I do. I'm always excited when I see members of our Congress go to Africa and see the benefits of biodiversity conservation there.
I think that's a huge way to help. And so I can tell you this administration is determined to do it and determined to be smart about it by using the best science to figure out where can we get the best benefits for both and that to me is sort of the sweet spot.
But do you think that ability is inhibited by the fact that the US isn't part of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Do you feel there's a need for the US government to convince Congress to become part of this international treaty.
Well, we are a member of the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, which was the coalition of countries that were the drivers behind achieving the thirty by thirty framework, and I think our role is clear you said it. We have a responsibility. We know it. We're stepping up to it. Do I wish we were a member of the Convention shore, But do I think that we will
continue to work very hard to meet the goals. The President said we want to achieve thirty by thirty, so we know that's our directive here in the federal government to make that happen. I also know he said we want to help other countries do the same. That's my job, so I spend a lot of time going out trying to figure out where are the best places, which governments can we work with, Where is the need the greatest, How do we work with our colleagues at USAID, Where
are they doing things? Where are the gaps. We spent a lot of time, for example, last summer in the Pacific Islands trying to help them. They are obviously important for biodiversity in the ocean, really important. That's some of the most pristine areas in the ocean that remain. There
are coral reefs there that are really vital. So we've been working hard with them on their ocean parks, if you will, and trying to find funding for permanence for ocean parks, which is a whole new area, so we're constantly pushing the envelope.
Thank you. That was a great conversation.
Thank you.
It's great to see rapid progress on protecting nature in the last few months, but the agreements are only great if they lead to action. The way the global economy is set up, it continues to undervalue nature, which needs to be corrected quickly. Thanks for listening to Zero. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with the bird watcher in your life. Zero's producer is Oscar Boyd and
senior producer is Christine Driskell. Our theme music is by Wonderly Special Thanks this week to Mobarrow, Anna Maazarakis, Stacey Wong, Eric Rosston, and Kira bindram i'm Akshatrati back next week.