Twelve of the world’s 17 most biodiverse nations, home to 70% of the planet’s species, are likely to miss the United Nations’ Oct. 20 deadline to submit plans for reversing biodiversity loss by 2030, a joint analysis by The Guardian and Carbon Brief found. At the U.N.’s 2022 conference on the Convention on Biological Diversity, known as COP15, nearly every country signed an agreement to protect biodiversity. A key part of the agreement calls for protecting 30% of the Earth’s water and land by the year 2030, or “30 by 30.” Countries were expected to submit new strategies to conserve nature before the next conference, COP16 in Cali, Colombia, which runs from Oct. 21 to Nov. 1. But of the convention’s 196 members, only 25 have followed through with the pledge in time. Currently, only 8% of the ocean is under some form of protection, and about 18% of land, and around 1 million species are at risk of extinction. The systemic failure to meet the key deadline is raising concerns that the goal of halting widespread species extinction and protecting a third of the planet will not be reachable. Only five megadiverse countries, with at least 5,000 endemic species, submitted their pledges in time: Australia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mexico. The United States, considered megadiverse, has refused to ratify the agreement for more than 30 years. All six Congo Basin countries, the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest, after the Amazon, missed the deadline. Other key nations, such as India and…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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