By Chris Howe

Getting countries to strike global agreements to save nature is no easy task. Which is why many – including WWF – have praised governments at the 2010 Convention of Biological Diversity for agreeing a new 10 year biodiversity rescue plan, to tackle the mass extinction of species and loss of habitats around the world.

But without diminishing the efforts of those who struck the deal, with the stakes so high, the question you have to ask is - will it actually work? And what do international deals like this deliver for native species at risk of extinction in New Zealand?

From my own experience, I had just started work at the Cornwall Wildlife Trust when the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), better known as the “Earth Summit” took place in June 1992. 

It would be fair to say that as manager of the Trust’s 50 nature reserves, a global conference on the other side of the world didn’t really feature in my day to day work, despite the fact that I was doing hands-on work to save some of the very habitats and species the Earth Summit was concerned with.

A number of international agreements and treaties were finalised at the Earth Summit that have come to dominate the global environment and development agenda. Agenda 21 is a forty-chapter, all encompassing document designed to guide sustainable development globally. It had some prominence in the years after the Earth Summit but has faded from view more recently. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in contrast, got off to a slow start. It wasn’t until 1997 that signatories to the convention agreed actual targets for greenhouse gas emissions (the Kyoto Protocol), and it didn’t come into force until 2005. New Zealand didn’t ratify the Kyoto Protocol until 2002, and Australians had to wait until Kevin Rudd came to power in 2007 before it was ratified. The United States of America has yet to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was also one of the flagship agreements from the Earth Summit. And, as was widely reported in the news last week, the parties to the Convention (but not the United States which has still not ratified this one, either) are still meeting, nearly twenty years later and talking about the urgent need to take action for the environment in general and biodiversity in particular.

The CBD Conference of the Parties (commonly known as a CoP) met two weeks ago in Nagoya, Japan. Thousands of delegates from nearly 200 countries descended on Nagoya, together with thousands more from non-government and business organisations all around the world. They came up with a comprehensive, ambitious and far reaching set of documents which have been hailed by many, including WWF, as significant progress towards saving biodiversity on planet earth. Some of the media were more circumspect and some downright dismissive.  Yet others called for new partnerships with business as a way of getting more action more quickly.

In a well-timed publication, a group of scientists have come up with the conclusion that while some species are under serious threat, it would have been a lot worse if the targets, and the conservation efforts that flowed from them, hadn’t been set in the first place.

My own experience in Cornwall definitely bears this out. Within a couple of years of the Earth Summit, we were developing our own Biodiversity Action Plan in response to the CBD, and the UK government’s own extensive assessment of priorities which was in turn influenced by a group of environmental organisations presenting a “Biodiversity Challenge” to them.

In New Zealand, the government did not publish its response to the CBD until 2000, with the New Zealand Biodiversity Strategy. A diplomatically worded review in 2005 found that while there had been some progress, much more needed to be done to conserve New Zealand’s wildlife.

Five years later, there is no sign of a strongly co-ordinated approach to conserving biodiversity across New Zealand. 2010 is the International Year of Biodiversity, a perfect opportunity for the government to step up with some major commitments, but as we near the end of the year, we’ve seen very little that’s new. In the government’s national report to the CBD submitted earlier this year, a hefty tome that’s not especially easy to navigate, we find on page six an admission of New Zealand’s inability to measure progress against many CBD or even national goals, because we simply don’t have a national state of the environment reporting process – one of only two OECD countries not to have such a requirement. To give the current government its due, it has committed to establishing this before its current term expires.

International conservation agreements are important, but their success depends not only on deals being struck, but on real action. What we really need – with or without an international deal – is a thorough and visionary approach to tackling New Zealand’s biodiversity crisis. The basic building blocks that are still needed were identified in the Biodiversity Strategy, in the review in 2005 and are still missing now. The agreement in Nagoya sets a global context for action – now New Zealand must respond.