Nature conservation summit in Yerevan: In the final stretch of the negotiations it's about money

Participants and observers describe the negotiations over the preservation of biodiversity in Yerevan as a “power struggle”. The 196 member states of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity have been meeting in the Armenian capital for over a week. Now the ministers arrive and try to reach an agreement.

They want to determine how the 23 goals contained in the Global Framework of the Biodiversity Agreement can be implemented over the next four years. The mood of observers after the first week of negotiations is sober: “There is no collective momentum,” says Yves Zinngrebe from the Leipzig Helmholtz Institute for Environmental Research. “The more it is about concrete implementation, the more national interests and the need for flexibility become louder.”

“Conserving biodiversity costs money,” says Georg Schwede from the Campaign organization in front of Nature, “and the Global South will only play along if the North pays.” The industrialized countries are clearly finding it difficult to accept this. In particular, the promise to reduce environmentally harmful subsidies by at least $500 billion annually by 2030 is controversial during the negotiations. “The less successful this is, the higher the price tag for Target 19 will be,” says Schwede. Goal 19 is to fund biodiversity conservation with an additional $200 billion per year from public and private sources.

With this in mind, the Federal Environment Ministry and the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation (BMZ) announced on Monday that they would provide $300 million for the Legacy Landscapes Fund, a world natural heritage fund, which promotes globally important protected areas in Africa. However, this commitment comes against the background of cuts in the budgets of the two ministries.

For future negotiations, “it will be crucial whether the member states decide on a committee in which not only the environment but also the finance ministers will sit in the future,” says Schwede. “Without involving the finance ministers, it will neither be possible to reduce environmentally harmful subsidies nor to mobilize the necessary financial resources for implementation.

Marie-Luise Abshagen, head of the Environment and Development Forum, observes in the negotiations “a trend from other multilateral negotiations – namely, a direct reference to negotiating human rights out of the texts.” Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran in particular have attempted to replace legally binding human rights language with non-binding terms such as “non-state actors”. “I hope that the other states will counter this,” says Abshagen.

It is also important that approaches such as “compensation instruments” are not given too much weight in the documents. “The principle of these instruments is theoretically simple: Anyone who takes something away from nature must give something of equal value back somewhere else,” says Abshagen. Biodiversity in the Global South is far too complex to simply compensate for destruction in one place in another. In addition, compensation instruments have repeatedly led to conflicts over land, but are becoming increasingly popular.

Whether there is agreement on the controversial points is still a matter for politicians until Friday. “But there are still big chunks of negotiations ahead of us,” says German Environment Minister Carsten Schneider (SPD), who is now taking part in the negotiations. He will be committed to concrete progress: “For a broader financing base from public and private funds and for a stronger say for the people who preserve nature locally,” said Schneider.

On site – that is exactly where there is a problem worldwide. “Environmentally harmful subsidies must also be urgently identified and reallocated in Germany and for the EU’s multiannual financial framework,” says Jannis Stoppel, an expert on international biodiversity and climate policy at the environmental organization Greenpeace. While the EU negotiates in Yerevan, environmental organizations are organizing the “Hands Off Nature” campaign, which is directed against efforts to weaken existing European nature and environmental protection laws.