Upcoming convention on biodiversity deserves attention

The most under-reported world meeting of the year is about to happen.

The meeting is the second part of the 15th Conference of Parties to the Convention on Biodiversity (aka COP-15). It is sometimes called the world biodiversity summit for short. It will take place from April 25 to May 8 in Kunming, China.

As its official name indicates, it is the 15th step toward implementation of the International Convention on Biodiversity, first presented for ratification at the 1992 “Earth Summit” in Brazil, and now signed by 196 countries. Only four nations are not parties to the convention: Andorra, Iraq, Somalia and the United States.

The meeting is important because it is this year's major international effort to address the loss of biodiversity.

Biodiversity loss is one of the three major environmental threats to our planet, as recognized in last year's UN report titled “Making Peace With Nature,” standing beside climate change and pollution in requiring our immediate attention. Of course, the three threats are interrelated, and all may be made worse by the same causes. This was made abundantly clear when the possibility of “nuclear winter” was first recognized decades ago.

Biodiversity, or biological diversity, includes all of the complexity and variation that exists in life on Earth.

It is all of the species of living things, the genetic differences within them, the multitude of ecological functions that they perform, and much more. It is what makes the world work.

The general trend in the 3.5 billion years of life on Earth has been the evolution of increased diversity. There have also been a few setbacks. However, what humans are now doing may soon rival the effects of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Continued loss of biodiversity will have serious impacts on the Earth and its people.

Loss of species also brings the loss of the functions of those species. Outbreaks of pests and diseases will become larger and more frequent as the species that keep them in check disappear.

Food production will be impaired with fewer species to provide pollination services to plants and to perform essential recycling in soils. Productivity of wild ecosystems will also suffer; this will reduce their carbon sequestration, water purification and other benefits that we often fail to think about.

In general, we will have less stability and more unpredictability. As always, the world's poorest communities will suffer most from these impacts.

Unfortunately, years of effort have not yet resulted in sufficient progress to stem biodiversity loss. In 2010, the COP-10 meeting in Aichi, Japan, produced the goals known as the “Aichi biodiversity targets,” which were to have been met by 2020. None of them were.

This is comparable to the fate of the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate. Something has clearly gone wrong.

Why has the Kunming meeting been under-reported? One reason may be that loss of biodiversity is not as visible to the average person as pollution or climate change.

North America's bird population is down by almost a third in the last 50 years. People may have heard of the “insect apocalypse.” But these crises do not produce images as striking as homes destroyed by hurricanes or giant gobs of plastic trash in the ocean.

Even the biological agent causing the lingering pandemic has not produced any particularly memorable and famous images. However, we should remember that what we cannot see can hurt us.

There may also be an international political angle. Many in the U.S. faulted Chinese President Xi Jinping last year for not attending the COP-26 Glasgow summit on climate change (although the U.S. and China did later present a joint declaration to the summit). The current state of U.S.-China relations could be interfering with better publicity of a summit now being hosted by China.

However, good efforts by all countries should be supported. International collaboration is needed to solve international problems. The Kunming summit has the potential to produce good news about a problem that threatens us all.

Food production will be impaired with fewer species to provide pollination services to plants and to perform essential recycling in soils.