Companies and financiers are more present at the UN Nature Conference than ever before. They hope for a strong commitment from the states to stop the loss of nature and clear, measurable goals.
The computer-programmed dinosaur Utahraptor of the UN Development Program brought a message to the UN Biodiversity Conference, which is ending. It carried a sign around its neck that read “Don’t choose extinction”.
It summarizes the core purpose of the meeting.
The message is primarily intended for the parties to the negotiation, i.e. the world’s almost two hundred UN member states, including Finland.
In the event that the state representatives miss the message, companies, financiers and investors are hearing the message brought by dino more widely than ever before at these meetings.
At the UN nature meeting in Montreal, the aim is to get the rules of the game for companies, how they can work better in terms of nature. The companies are also hoping for clear international commitments from the meeting to stop the loss of nature.
About 400 companies have signed a campaign in Montreal that calls for mandatory reporting of environmental hazards.
– Deforestation is also a significant fundamental risk for companies, says the leading expert of the Finnish Confederation of Business and Industry EK, who has just returned from Montreal Janne Peljo.
More than half of the global gross domestic product is dependent on nature. For companies related to food production, the risks of nature loss are the first to appear. This year we have seen, for example, in the prices of cocoa beans and coffee, how weather conditions affect production.
Nature provides us with clean water, air and food.
– We get a lot of benefits from the ecosystem, everything that humans need to survive on this planet. Every day when we wake up, this planet feeds us with those services, says Francis Ogwal2nd Chair of the Biodiversity Convention.
It is difficult to measure the effects of business activities on nature and nature loss. The measurement technology will already develop in the next year so that some kind of measurement is possible.
– All companies should have enough time to take measures to slow down the loss of nature. What is needed now is forerunners to point the way, but in order to have effects on a large scale, all companies must join the group. In the longer term, it becomes an expectation value for companies’ own operations, says Peljo.
The goal of the meeting is to turn the global loss of nature onto the road to recovery. In 2030, 30 percent of the Earth’s nature would then be protected.
– If the accounting for natural hazards starts, then on the basis of that, the large-scale introduction of the causer pays principle or taxation on the basis of natural hazards can be done or considered on a voluntary basis. In that way, activities would be mainstreamed for non-governmental actors as well, says the chairman of the Finnish Nature Panel, who is participating in the meeting Janne Kotiaho.
Although one of the core purposes of the meeting is to prevent extinctions, there are still about 1,400 square brackets in the draft agreement, i.e. things to be agreed on. The last days of the meeting will be difficult when trying to reach an agreement on these points.
Dozens of developing countries already walked out once when the nature conservation funding was negotiated. The funding gap is about 700 billion dollars a year.
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The world gathers in a giant meeting in Canada to stop the loss of nature – test what you know about loss of nature and negotiations in a quiz