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2030 Biodiversity Target Was Always a Long Shot, UK Official Says
When negotiators in Montreal agreed in 2022 to halt and reverse global biodiversity loss by 2030, many knew the goal was ambitious, says a former United Kingdom negotiator-but the targets were about more than just hitting the numbers.
In an interview with Carbon Brief, William Lockhart, who represented the UK at United Nations nature negotiations from 2021 to early 2025, expressed ambivalence about whether countries can meet the conservation targets of the 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), aimed at reversing biodiversity loss within five years.
It remains possible with "the right interventions at exactly the right scale," he said, but countries are not on a trajectory to make it happen.
But the numbers attached to the targets aren't the main point of the COP negotiations, Lockhart added.
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"The important thing is that people spent a lot of time thinking about why we were setting certain kinds of targets," he said, adding that while targets should be specific, measurable and achievable, there were open questions about what those criteria meant, and what message they were meant to send.
"This is politics; this isn't necessarily science."
More than half the countries that submitted plans to the UN did not commit to protecting 30% of their territories for nature-a target as important to biodiversity conservation as the 1.5C pathway is for climate action, writes Carbon Brief. "Countries have never fully met any target to help nature since the UN biodiversity convention was established in the 1990s."
Lockhart questioned the role of UN summits like the COPs and whether they can be effective for global action. In one sense, he said, the world is asking too much of the COPs, "there's so much coverage and intense scrutiny."
"'This person's arrived', 'this comma has moved'...There's an extraordinary media circus."
But the world also asks too little of the COPs, he added, because success and failure hinges on details as small as particular words, while overall progress stalls. Lockhart said he and his colleagues worry that the COPs are being seen as ends in themselves.
"We agree on stuff," he told Carbon Brief. But that stuff "doesn't get delivered, by and large," because "political factors, capability factors, jurisdictional factors, all sorts of different things" undermine implementation processes.
"The problem is that by focusing on COPs as an end to themselves, we risk missing the wood for the trees."
Still, Lockhart hasn't given up on the talks. "It's extremely important, in my view, that you have a space where the whole world can come together in a room and agree that it wants to do something," he said.
If targets like those in the GBF aren't achievable, "then the question is: 'Why did the world agree to it?'" he asked. "And the answer to that is: 'Because it matters that we try.'"
Source: The Energy Mix
