COP16 UN Biodiversity Negotiations: Why the United States will not join this key treaty to save nature

By many measures, the United States is a global environmental leader — with the exception of four years under former President Trump. It has some of the strongest environmental laws in the world, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. The country is investing billions of dollars to combat climate change and wildlife decline. It produces much of the world's leading environmental research.

Mostly, the country takes pride in these environmental achievements.

This is what makes it so surprising: the United States is the only country in the world, other than the Vatican, that has not joined the most important global treaty for nature conservation. The treaty, known as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), is not just an insignificant agreement. The agreement is designed to protect Earth's life support systems, animals and ecosystems – a task that requires global cooperation.

The Convention achieved one of its most important achievements in 2022 when its member states agreed on a groundbreaking new deal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030, called the Global Biodiversity Framework. The deal includes 23 goals, including conserving at least 30% of land and oceans and cutting annual subsidies that harm ecosystems by at least $500 billion. Experts hailed it as the Paris Agreement for Nature, the global treaty to combat climate change.

This week and next, officials from those member states will meet in Cali, Colombia, in an event known as COP16 to formally review their progress. They will also negotiate a number of other issues including how to manage genetic data from plants and animals stored in open access databases.

A senior State Department official told Vox that the US government will send a large delegation to Cali that includes technical experts. But while the delegation will try to influence the negotiations, it will not have an official say in any outcomes. So, for example, if countries come up with a plan to manage genetic data, the United States won't be able to formally object if it doesn't agree to the terms.

Experts say this is a problem. Fixing the biodiversity crisis is an enormous task, requiring reform of entire industries and financial flows that harm nature, such as industrial agriculture and the subsidies that support it. As the largest economy on the planet, the United States has a great deal of control over these industries.

So why isn't he at the negotiating table?

Nearly half a century ago, scientists were already warning that dozens of species were at risk of extinction — just as they are today. Indeed, the headlines at the time were eerily familiar: “Scientists say 1 million species are at risk,” said one headline from 1981, almost identical to a headline from 2019.

These concerns sparked a series of meetings between environmental groups and UN officials, in the 1980s and early 1990s, that laid the foundation for a treaty to protect biodiversity. American diplomats have been heavily involved in these discussions, said William Snape III, an environmental lawyer and assistant provost at American University and senior adviser at the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group.

“It was the United States that championed the idea of ​​a biodiversity treaty in the 1980s, and was influential in launching efforts in the early 1990s,” Snepe wrote in the Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy in 2010.

In the summer of 1992, the Convention on Biological Diversity was opened for signature at a major United Nations conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It identified three goals: preserving biodiversity (from genes to ecosystems), using its components in a sustainable way, and sharing the various benefits of genetic resources fairly.

Dozens of countries signed the agreement at the time, including the United Kingdom, China and Canada. But the United States – under then-President George H.W. Bush – was not particularly one of them. It was largely a matter of politics: It was an election year that pitted Bush against then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and a number of senators in Bush's party opposed signing the treaty, citing a wide range of concerns.

Among them was the fear that US biotechnology companies would be forced to share their genetics-related intellectual property with other countries. There were also widespread concerns that the United States would be responsible for helping poor countries — financially and otherwise — protect their natural resources, and that the agreement would place more environmental regulations in the United States. (At the time, there was already opposition between the timber industry and property rights groups over existing environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.)

Some industries also opposed the signing. As environmental lawyer Robert Bloomquist wrote in a 2002 article in the Golden Gate University Law Journal, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association and the Industrial Biotechnology Association sent letters to Bush stating that they opposed the United States signing the Convention on Biological Diversity because of intellectual property rights concerns.

In 1992, Clinton won reelection and, in a move praised by conservationists, signed the treaty shortly after taking office. But there remains a major hurdle to joining the Convention on Biological Diversity: ratification by the Senate, which requires 67 votes.

Clinton was well aware of the opposition to CBD in Congress. So, when he sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification in 1993, he included with it seven “understandings” that sought to allay concerns about intellectual property and sovereignty. These principles essentially make clear that the United States, as a party to the agreement, would not have to do anything and would retain sovereignty over its natural resources, Snepe wrote. Clinton also stressed that the United States already has strong environmental laws and will not need to create more of them to meet the goals of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

In a promising move, the bipartisan Senate Foreign Relations Committee overwhelmingly recommended that the Senate ratify the treaty, making its passage appear certain. At that point, the biotech industry also threw its support behind the agreement, Blomquist wrote.

However, Republican Sens. Jesse Helms and Bob Dole, along with many of their colleagues, blocked ratification of the agreement from a vote at all, Snapp said, repeating the same arguments. The treaty remained weak on the Senate floor.

Which pretty much brings us up to speed: no president has submitted the treaty for ratification since then.

Three decades later, concerns about American sovereignty persist, especially within the Republican Party, and keep the United States out of the treaties. Conservative lawmakers stand in the way not only of the CBD, but of several other treaties awaiting ratification by the Senate, including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

“Conservative nationalists in the United States (including the Senate) have long distrusted international agreements,” Stuart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Fox in 2021. He added that they view it as “efforts made by the international community.” The United Nations and foreign governments to impose restrictions on the constitutional independence of the United States, interfere in American private sector activity, as well as create redistribution schemes.

In other words, not much has changed.

In 2021, a week after Biden was sworn in, the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, published a report calling on the Senate to oppose a number of treaties while he was in office, “on the grounds that they threaten the United States.” Sovereignty of the United States.” They include the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Arms Trade Treaty, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, among others. (Environmental treaties like the Convention on Biological Diversity tend to attract stronger opposition from conservative lawmakers, who often They are less afraid of environmental regulations, compared to other agreements).

Legal experts say sovereignty concerns are unfounded. The Convention stipulates that states retain jurisdiction over their own environment. In fact, American negotiators made sure of that when they helped craft the agreement in the 1990s, Patrick wrote in World Politics Review in 2021. “States…have the sovereign right to exploit their own resources in accordance with their own environmental policies,” the article said. Article 3 of the Convention on Biological Diversity. (Article 3 states that states are also responsible for ensuring that they do not harm the environment in other countries.)

“The agreement poses no threat to US sovereignty,” wrote Patrick, author of “Sovereignty Wars.”

What about other concerns? The agreement stipulates that any transfer of genetic technology to poor countries must comply with intellectual property rights in rich countries, Patrick writes. The Seven Clinton Understandings also affirmed that joining the Convention on Biological Diversity would not weaken US intellectual property rights and made clear that the treaty could not force the United States to contribute a certain amount of financial resources.

Snape and Patrick said joining the Convention on Biological Diversity is unlikely to require anything in the way of new domestic environmental policies. “The United States is already committed to the substantive terms of the treaty: it has a well-developed system of protected natural areas, and has policies in place to reduce biodiversity loss in environmentally sensitive areas,” Patrick wrote.

The United States says it embraces the goals of the convention — conserving and sharing the benefits of nature — and has worked hard to achieve an ambitious global biodiversity framework.

The State Department told Vox that it supports this framework except for a few of its goals related, unsurprisingly, to the private sector. These include reducing government subsidies that harm the environment and increasing spending on foreign aid to preserve the environment. This is partly because decisions about government spending require congressional approval. US representatives cannot unilaterally agree on financial goals.

This brings us once again to what is ultimately the barrier to stronger environmental action in the United States: Congress. Reforming nature-harming industries and funding conservation will require approval by a closely divided Congress, as well as joining the Convention on Biological Diversity.

For the foreseeable future, the votes are not there.

Patrick said that if former President Trump wins the election next month, the prospect of joining the CBD will become even bleaker. He said some of the goals set out in the global biodiversity framework — such as the goal of conserving 30 percent of U.S. land — “are a complete anathema to any potential Trump administration.”

This ultimately makes it difficult for the Convention, this life-sustaining treaty, to accomplish anything.

“The world is in the midst of an environmental emergency,” Patrick said. Given the scale of this, it is embarrassing that the United States was without permission. It just undermines what is already a really heavy burden.