COP 16 Biodiversity Summit

Still trapped in old narratives.

A couple months ago, I wrote about Susana Muhamad, Minister of Environment for Colombia, which is currently hosting the COP16 biodiversity summit in the city of Cali. Some of her comments seemed to indicate an awareness of the biological underpinnings of climate, that what we do to the land is as important to the climate as what we put in the atmosphere. She spoke of climate as a two sided coin, one side for decarbonization and another for helping “nature to take again its power over planet Earth so that we can really stabilize climate.” Such language echoed Millan Millan’s two-legged concept, and I was particularly encouraged by her desire to make biodiversity “as politically relevant as climate talks.”

Was the biological side of climate making its way into what has so far been a predominately physical, mathematically modeled perspective? That was my hope, but today, on the conference’s last day, I’m realizing my optimism was premature. The narrative on climate and biodiversity, such as I can tease out, doesn’t seem to have significantly changed.

From the Convention on Biological DIversity’s landing page I navigated to “Topics” and selected “Climate Change.” There I found a box that read “Climate Change is a major and growing driver of biodiversity loss.” I clicked that and arrived at a page with a text heading that read:

The efforts to protect and restore habitats not only benefit biodiversity but also offer cost-effective and proven measures to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

This is the classic framing of the IPCC. Carbon on top as the physical driver of climate, with living systems below as opportunities for mitigation and adaptation to carbon-caused climate change. Missing is the growing recognition that the climate itself, as with a breathable atmosphere, is the product of living things and systems. Consider for comparison, the moon. It hangs in the same solar neighborhood as we do, but lacking a temperature-regulating biosphere, it suffers intense extremes. A day at the equator can run to a high of 250F while sinking at night to -208F. Such extremes are unimaginable to us where, enjoying a biosphere, we take it for granted that temperatures fluctuate slightly around a comfortable, liveable mean.

But what if we understood this connection, or more importantly, what if we felt it? What if we experienced the atmosphere less as physical gasses surrounding a helpless Earth, and more as something breathed into life and managed by Earth’s powerful biosphere? Might we be better focused on the need to protect that biosphere?

Certainly, the need exists. As reported in The Guardian today, “Governments risk another decade of failure on biodiversity loss, due to the slow implementation of an international agreement to halt the destruction of Earth’s ecosystems.”

I don’t want to be too critical here, because I am all for this conference and dearly hope for its success. But I think we are seeing yet again that we have a narrative problem when it comes to both climate and biodiversity. We’ve put them in conceptual boxes which serve to only increase our detachment from the natural world.

The sooner we break out of these boxes the better, for both climate and biodiversity.

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