UN Biodiversity Conference: COP 15

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Thursday 12th January 2023 Grand Committee

[The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park) (Con)]

First, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Randall, for tabling this debate and for his continuous championing of the environmental issue ever since I have known him. I also thank other noble Lords for their contributions.

As many noble Lords appreciate—this was said in all the contributions—the catastrophic decline in the abundance, connectivity and diversity of life on earth is not only a tragedy but an existential threat. Everything that we have and need is dependent on nature and on our ability to reconcile our lives, our economies and our politics with the natural world. The Covid pandemic showed us what the world can do when it senses danger.

The reality is that the consequences of runaway climate change, biodiversity collapse and environmental degradation are vastly more serious. That is why tackling climate change and biodiversity loss is rightly a top international priority for the Government. It is why we have been campaigning internationally for the world to agree a “Paris moment” for nature. It is why we celebrate the outcome of the COP 15 UN Biodiversity Conference and all the progress made there to protect and restore nature.

The noble Lord, Lord Randall, and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, asked why the media have shown so little interest in this issue. My guess is as good as theirs. It is depressing. It is hard to imagine a more important international summit than the one we saw in Montreal just a few weeks ago, but the media seem to reduce all environmental considerations down to the one issue of carbon. Of course, climate change is massively important, but the environment is much more than carbon. It is everything, as I have already said and as noble Lords said in their speeches. It is somewhat depressing that the press do not focus on this issue; perhaps it is a yearning on their part to focus on only the bad news. The UN conference in Montreal was good news; it was not perfect, as I will come on to in a second, but perhaps there is no market for good news in the UK media nowadays.

I note that the Independent has a new editor. Notwithstanding his many qualities, he is a climate sceptic, which I find worrying. We seem to be seeing a disconnect between the media and what we know exists in people: desperate concern for the natural world and a yearning for more biodiversity and improved nature. It does not matter which constituency our colleagues in the other place represent—there is not a single constituency in this country where a majority do not want more nature. They want leadership from government.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, asked about the potential discrepancy we see between developed and developing countries; I will come on to that in a second. I have been there. I have engaged with countries—north, south, east, west, rich, poor, nature-rich, nature-depleted—for as long as I have been a Minister. This matter is somewhat overstated. The majority of the engagement I have had with countries has left me feeling more, not less, optimistic. Yes, one or two African countries were concerned about the manner in which the agreement was reached, but many more were wildly enthusiastic. That is not to say that they did not have concerns, but those concerns were addressed, which is why we ended up with this agreement.

Let me add this: shift your focus to the small island developing states in the Pacific or the Caribbean, for example. They, too, had concerns about finance and many of the issues that have been raised today, but there is no doubt that their voice was louder than anyone’s in calling for an ambitious agreement. They wanted ambition. These issues are existential for small island developing states. It is not really a north/south or developed/developing divide; there are divides but they are overplayed. Overwhelmingly, the world is moving rapidly into the right position on this issue.

In the early hours of 19 December, world leaders finally agreed an ambitious global framework for action to put nature on a road to recovery. It was that “Paris moment” for nature that we had been asking for. Of course, the job now is to honour it in full. The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework gives us a clear mission to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by the end of this decade. It includes a highly ambitious package of 23 targets for 2030 and four goals for 2050. These include global commitments to end human-induced species extinctions and to protect 30% of our global land and 30% of our global ocean by 2030—by the way, if that is not a newspaper headline, what is? This is an extraordinary commitment; of course, we have to make it real, but it is huge. It will be delivered through a package of nature financing, including a new international fund and the expectation that $30 billion will flow into developing countries to protect biodiversity every year by 2030.

We also agreed to establish a new multilateral system to share the benefits from the use of stored genetic information from plants and animals. To ensure that countries deliver on their commitments, the international community, for the first time, agreed a package of scientific indicators to track and report progress.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, mentioned the critical issue of indigenous people in local communities, and she is absolutely right. This has been central to our approach in the UK. She knows from COP 26 that we created as many platforms as possible to amplify the voice of indigenous people. That was noted, recognised and appreciated by the groups representing indigenous people and by the people themselves. We have continued that work.

For example, the delivery and design of LEAF—the biggest public/private partnership to support forests around the world—writes indigenous people all the way through its text and criteria. That has been appreciated. We also help to co-ordinate the donor group to ensure that the money promised to indigenous groups is properly delivered. I talk very regularly to representatives of those organisations to ensure that they are happy with the direction of travel and that we are getting advice from people on the front line. Some 80% of the world’s forest biodiversity is in land controlled and lived in by indigenous people. That is not a coincidence; they are the most effective at protecting nature and they need to be supported. Even if it were not for the moral issues, and just for practical considerations, the cheapest way to save nature is to look after the people who are doing it.

I do not say this lightly or with hubris, but I place on the record my boundless thanks to our excellent negotiators, because COP 15 was a triumph for UK diplomacy and soft power as well, with outcomes at the upper end of what we expected. Our negotiators—I saw this myself—played a critical role in raising ambition and galvanising momentum. I do not believe that we would have secured anything like the ambition we did without their Herculean efforts.

Our team was central to securing consensus on the highly contentious issue of digital sequence information; our science leads developed the important framework of indicators for tracking progress; we led the High Ambition Coalition and the Global Ocean Alliance, which helped secure the 30by30 targets, with relentless engagement and campaigning across the board; we convened and I led the High Ambition ministerial group to try to improve cross-regional co-ordination and strengthen ambition; and we worked over many months, alongside Ecuador, Gabon and the Maldives, to develop the credible 10 Point Plan for Financing Biodiversity, which has now been endorsed by 40 countries from five continents and was an initiative that played a visible and measurable role in unblocking ambition in the run-up to the CBD.

I also announced the Joint Donor Statement on International Finance for Biodiversity and Nature, alongside my friend and colleague the European Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevičius and my French counterpart Minister Christophe Béchu. That included new commitments from donors for the protection, restoration and sustainable use of nature, and a significant increase in nature financing, which was crucial for securing a consensus on finance in the GBF.

The outcome of the CBD COP was the culmination of years of hard work. I believe we can be proud of the role played by the UK. In Glasgow, in 2021, we brought nature from the margins of global climate politics and put it at the heart of our response. We secured an unprecedented package of commitments on forests and land use. Forbes described it as

“a Paris moment for forests”.

WWF said:

“Nature truly arrived at COP26.”


The Tropical Forest Alliance wrote:

“we’ll look back and realise that this was the day when we finally turned the tide on deforestation”.

We took the momentum we created from COP 26, as well as the networks we needed to secure it, and used that to help drive ambition at COP 15. Our responsibility now is to turn those commitments into action.

That is why the UK has committed £3 billion of our international climate finance to climate solutions that protect, restore and help manage nature sustainably. I want to take up the point that the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, made on extravagance. He cited a few examples of things we are spending money on in this regard, but implied that they were the totality of our commitment. They are not. The commitment is £3 billion, within which a lot of other new commitments are being made.

I would just say this. Who knows what will happen at the next general election, but part of this commitment will be delivered after the election. If we have a new Government then, it is absolutely crucial that this remains the cross-party issue that it very clearly is. I pay tribute to the noble Baroness opposite for the manner in which we always debate these issues. It is crucial that we keep that promise, because our commitments led other countries to make their commitments. If we break our pledge, they break theirs, and we will let a lot of poorer countries down all around the world.

At COP 15 we announced some specifics, some of which the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, mentioned: £29 million to support developing countries with their land protection commitments, helping to deliver 30by30; around £6 million for projects to study and restore nature across our overseas territories; £20 million in grants to protect healthy marine ecosystems and reduce overfishing; £17 million to the World Bank’s PROBLUE programme to support marine ecosystems; £7.2 million to a new nature positive economy programme, which will support Governments, central banks, businesses and financial institutions in developing countries to integrate the value of nature into their decision-making; and a nature facility to help integrate and safeguard nature in our own official development assistance with other countries. That is key because, as noble Lords will remember, we persuaded the G7 last year to make a commitment—which again was not reported but was huge, in my view—to ensure that all our ODA and our aid is aligned with nature and eventually nature positive. We will need these tools to deliver that promise as well.

Having worked so hard to secure these targets, and put finance in place to help achieve them, it is key that the UK also leads by example, a point made by all speakers. The Environment Act gives us all the tools we need to do so, including putting in place a new set of ambitious domestic targets on nature, air, water, waste, et cetera. Later this month, in our first statutory environmental improvement plan, Defra will set out the measures we will adopt to achieve them.

As has been said by I think all speakers, a key tool to deliver nature recovery is radical reform of farming subsidies in England. The noble Lord, Lord Howarth, and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, made this point; I think my noble friend Lord Randall did as well. Over a seven-year transition period, we are phasing out area-based agricultural subsidies and shifting our support for farm subsidies to deliver environmental goals.

That matters hugely for us in the UK, but it has global implications too. We are told that the cost of turning the tide on nature destruction is around $500 billion a year. By coincidence, that is roughly what is spent by the top 50 food-producing countries on subsidising often highly destructive land use every year. If we can persuade them to shift their focus in the way we are here, a gigantic finance gap can be closed. That is yet another reason why this Government, and successive Governments, absolutely must not allow this programme of reform to be derailed. That is critical. No matter what pressure is felt from those entrenched vested interests, it must be resisted.

Finally, we know that the global challenge ahead is huge, and that no country will face it alone. That is why the UK is at the centre of efforts to bring coalitions together of donor countries, philanthropists, nature-rich countries and the private sector to try to help turn the tide for some of the world’s key natural systems on land and at sea. Over the course of this year I hope I will be able to talk more about some of those initiatives in the Congo basin, the Amazon rainforest, Indonesia, et cetera. This is an absolute priority for me and, I am thrilled to say, for the Foreign Office and Defra.

COP 15 has provided momentum and a framework within which nature can recover and thrive. The UK Government played a really important part in the international effort to build that framework. Now we are and will remain committed to playing our part in full in a decade of global action to secure the abundance, diversity and connectivity of life on earth, and, in doing so, building not only a better future but a viable, liveable future for generations to come.