At COP27, a call for the success of biodiversity negotiations

“Climate change is becoming one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss, while our accelerated destruction of nature compromises its ability to provide crucial services, including climate change mitigation and adaptation,” these five write. "champions of the Paris agreement".

However, "there is no way to limit global warming to 1,5°C (the most ambitious objective of the Paris agreement) without taking action to protect and restore nature," they write, recalling "the interconnection of the climate and biodiversity crises".

They "therefore urge(s) leaders to step up their actions to address the accelerating loss of nature by proposing an ambitious and game-changing global agreement on biodiversity at COP15".

The text is signed by Laurent Fabius, who as French Minister of Foreign Affairs chaired COP21 in Paris in 2015, Christiana Figueres, who chaired the UN-Climate agency at the time of the conclusion of the agreement, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, "champion of the agenda for action for nature and people" of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and Laurence Tubiana, special representative of France at COP21.

A few weeks before the opening on December 7 of the COP15 on biodiversity, many observers are worried about a possible failure of this "conference of the parties".

For three years, the signatories of the CBD - 195 countries and the European Union but not the United States - have been trying to define a global framework until 2030 for the protection of nature and its resources essential to humans, while the previous objectives in terms of biodiversity conservation have not been met.