Good Sunday Morning!
I hope I will see many of you this evening at our big FUN-raising online event!
It is not too late to register. I am really excited that Neil Young is going to try to drop by. Fingers crossed! Of course, Mike Morrice is joining, JP and me as well as Sarah Harmer who was here at COP15!
This morning’s letter still finds me in snowy Montreal, with the negotiations in high gear at COP15 of the CBD (15th Conference of the Parties of the Biodiversity Convention).
Click here for a printer-ready PDF version of this GSM letter.
And with 24 hours to go, we have no sense of whether the results will be worth the effort.
My parliamentary colleagues have (for the most part) headed off for holidays. Before I went to COP, I was pretty sure the House would be adjourning early because a Cabinet minister had mentioned they were leaving for Cuba on Thursday. Sure enough, we adjourned on Wednesday after a few more votes and tributes to my friend Jim Carr who died days earlier. I joined by Zoom from Montreal to speak on behalf of the Green Party about Jim whom I had known since 2000. Here is my tribute to him.
Some other Canadian MPs are here. Cabinet Ministers in and out of COP include Jonathan Wilkinson, Joyce Murray, Marie Claude Bibeau, but it is Steven Guilbeault who has been working hard non-stop.
In this, Canada has something akin to a split personality. If there is any deal, we will have to thank Steven Guilbeault. This will not be thanks to Canadian leadership in taking strong positions. We have not. Rather, as the host minister, but not the chair, Steven Guilbeault has taken on a very unusual role. He has been indispensable in getting regions, countries, and individual ministers to talk. Without his officials knowing, he opened up direct lines of communication between ministers, through Whatsapp. Steven and the President (chair) – China’s Minister of Environment and Climate, Huang Ranqiu – have been working well together. China has its networks and alliances and they do not overlap much with Canada’s. Working together, they are successful in building bridges and connections that would not have been possible by either alone.
While other MPs are off, I am glad I am here. One contribution I could uniquely make was to convene all other elected Greens from around the world for the Global Greens COP tradition of “Green Family Breakfast.” Then on Thursday morning, Jonathan Pedneault and I hosted a key strategy session. Attending COP15 are elected Green MPs (often the chief negotiators for their country) from Germany, Finland, Austria, Belgium, Scotland, and the European Parliament.
COP15 is scheduled to end Monday evening, but there are pretty solid bets it will run later. Talks on the draft key item, for a “Global Biodiversity Framework” (GBF) ended at 2 am Saturday morning, but it needs to be strengthened and many issues remain to be resolved.
The GBF was the key goal of this COP, originally scheduled for September 2020. The call from most conservation organizations, the European Union, the US – even though the US is not a party – Canada, and others is for the protection of 30% of the planet’s biodiversity by 2030. Many are focussing on the “halt and reverse” plan- stop destroying biodiversity by 2030 and restore and repair existing loss. The new buzz words are to be “nature positive.” The “30 by 30” goal is easily communicated, but fairly meaningless without a plan to implement, financing, and clarity about what it means.
For many nations that are industrialized and relatively small, their land base is fully occupied. Large-scale new national parks are not possible in such countries. But as my colleague Lorna Slater, co-leader of the Scottish Greens and Minister for Biodiversity, told the plenary such countries can sign on to the GBF. Key is to conserve biodiversity within the settled areas through such steps as reducing (ending) pesticide use to allow pollinators and other insect life to be restored, changing agricultural practices, and enhancing and expanding natural areas. We also need to control our much-loved, pampered pussy cats from wiping out songbirds. From a similar perspective, Green Member of the European Parliament from Finland, Ville Niinisto explained that over 80% of Finland’s impact in eroding biological diversity is through its import and consumption of products from other countries, especially from the developing world. Finland is looking to curtail consumption while funding biodiversity protection in developing countries.
As ever in multilateral environmental agreement negotiations, the key divide is between developing and industrialized countries. The developing nations here at COP15 will not sign on to a GBF without a clear commitment to a new fund to assist poorer nations in rejecting pressures to log their rainforests, drill for oil and gas in sensitive ecosystems, or to arrest the enormous damage from mining. In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, all developing nations walked out over the issue of financing. The strange thing is that the block on financing is the EU, largely due to France. Rumour has it Macron wants to host a major summit in Gabon in the new year, branding conservation and funding to protect Africa’s forests as a French initiative.
I had not realized how very much the climate is threatened as well as biodiversity by pressures on the forests of the Great Congo Basin. At our Green Family Breakfast, German Green MEP Jutta Paulus explained her personal focus on peatlands. Huge stores of carbon could be released into the atmosphere if the vast rainforests of the Congo Basin are logged.
The CBD itself always contemplated the protection of biological diversity at multiple scales, from species survival to ecosystems, and from landscapes right down to genetic diversity.
The gap between our claimed leadership and failures was highlighted in a press conference held by Canadian Greens with the Montreal Green Coalition. These determined local nature champions are fighting to protect critical wetlands on the lands of the Montreal airport and adjacent Technoparc. I was thrilled that former Quebec Environment Minister and former Liberal MP, who led Canada’s delegation at COP2 of CBD in 1995, Clifford Lincoln, joined us to call for the protection of this critical habitat. At 94, he is amazing. Seeing him again was such a joy! Here I am with my hero at a press conference about Biodiversity at our Doorstop. It begins at 1 minute 15 seconds.
This is my December 9 question in Question Period on the Technoparc issue. Will we save wildlife habitats from development?
Before closing this rambling letter (apologies) I did want to mention the threat of deep-sea mining. One of my new heroes in this movement is the Minister from Vanuato (full title: Minister for Climate Change, Adaptation, Meteorology, Geo-Hazards, Environment and Energy) Ralph Regenvau. Vanuatu is the only nation fully endorsing the need to establish the crime of Ecocide. Ralph and I met at an Ecocide event and became fast friends. Turns out he did work decades ago in Indigenous fisheries in British Columbia, including on the Thompson River. I have been working on the threat of deep-sea mining for some years, but I promised him I would do more! Please read A Call To Protect Our Pacific Ocean.
And this article from the Guardian includes the threat from Canadian mining companies.
Best to all!! Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah – so Happy Hanukkah!
I will be on the train from December 23-27, so I think it is best to skip next week’s Good Sunday Morning – on Christmas Day! So for those who celebrate, Merry Christmas!!!
I will write again on New Year’s Day!
Love,
Elizabeth
P.S. We lost a beautiful member of our Green Party family this week. Jenni Le Forestier passed away on Dec. 9, 2022. She was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of cancer last summer. She ran in Dufferin—Caledon. She leaves her husband and daughter Josephine, 13 years old.
For those who wish to do more and are able, a Go Fund Me Page has been created to accept donations for her young daughter’s future education, hopefully OCAD.