California Natural Resources Agency

October 30, 2024 

Last week, I led a small team from the Newsom Administration on a trip to Colombia for an intense five days at the United Nations’ biodiversity summit. Over 25,000 leaders, scientists and activists from around the world poured into the vibrant city of Cali to intensify efforts to protect and restore nature across the planet.

Let’s talk UN Speak

It was a big week. But first, a little on the UN process that brought us here. This summit is actually called a Conference of Parties (COP for short), which refers to the nations that are party to a global treaty organized by the UN. That treaty is called the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD). In 2022, at the last COP held in Montreal, 196 parties to the Convention signed a landmark global agreement to conserve nature and biodiversity: the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. This included a commitment to conserve 30% of lands and waters across the planet by 2030. This global target is known as “30 by 30.”

The international negotiations at COP 16 definitely left a lot of core issues on the table—including raising adequate funding to achieve the Framework’s commitments. Yet, the overall convening reflected major progress.

The UN organizes separate COP summits to combat climate change, since there is a different global treaty on climate change. The climate change summit, COP 29, will be held in Azerbaijan in November. Those climate COPs have been bigger and more well-established than the biodiversity COPs. There’s a good question to be asked about why there are two separate processes given these crises are so linked. It’s also worth noting that the US is the only nation that has not ratified the Biodiversity Convention (given the high threshold to ratify treaties through the US Senate). Nevertheless, the Biden/Harris administration has played a constructive role in both the Montreal and Cali COPs.

Why Cali to Cali?

The fundamental purpose of a COP is to enable nations to negotiate decisions that will implement the Global Biodiversity Framework and the Convention on Biological Diversity more broadly. California and other “subnational” governments (states, provinces and cities) can’t participate in negotiations, so why do we show up at the COPs? Three main reasons:

1. California is among the most ambitious governments in the world combating climate change and protecting biodiversity. Our environmental targets, laws, investments and programs lead the world. And as the fifth largest economy, the world is watching us. We can share our amazing progress—warts and all—with the rest of the world.

    

2. These crises are global in scale. We can’t solve these problems ourselves in California and need to help mobilize the rest of the world to take faster, broader action. California’s voice is strong at these COPs given our visibility across the world.

    

3. These COPs are a forum for working together across borders to move further and faster. The world’s indigenous leaders, best scientists, biggest philanthropies, and most visionary NGOs use these events to come together and shape strategies for action. We use these summits to share our experiences and borrow the best approaches from others.

This year in Cali, California showed up in a big way, over 100 people strong! Our delegation included tribal leaders, state legislators, local government, scientists, and activists. All focused on sharing our story from California, learning the best ideas to bring back, and speaking in a unified voice for more environmental investment and commitments.

I was able to share more on California’s role at the COP when I spoke to the LA Times from Cali.

Reflections:

My head spins from talking to so many smart and inspiring people at these summits. Here are 5 high-level thoughts on the top of my mind.

1. Green is infrastructure. “Nature needs to be treated like the essential infrastructure it is,” Sierra Leone Environment Minister Jiwoh Abdulai told me. I couldn’t agree more. We need healthy, intact nature for our planet to function effectively, from removing and storing carbon from our atmosphere to delivering clean, abundant water. Governments need to invest more in keeping nature healthy. And affluent countries need to do more to help protect nature in the global south where it is most intact.

    

2. All conservation is local. Simply put, conserving nature only works if local communities are bought-in, and solutions match local challenges. While global action is needed and governmental leadership is essential, conservation can’t be top down. Investments and programs need to be shaped by those on the ground to meet the needs of both biodiversity/nature and local communities.

    

3. Important lands in native hands: Up to 80% of the world’s biodiversity has been managed by indigenous communities. Strengthening indigenous power and sovereignty is essential to protect nature across the world. Doing so allows lands to benefit from traditional ecological knowledge and management that has been refined over millennia. Ancestral land return and co-management is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do.

    

4. We need companies in conservation: While governments need to fund more nature conservation, the largest players in the global economy, private companies, are largely absent. We need the private sector to step up and invest in tackling these environmental crises, moving away from simply “externalizing” environmental impacts. Big, smart companies are innovating ways to do this (could some kind of “biodiversity credits” be one pathway?). We need to support this leadership and help companies find credible pathways to invest in nature.

    

5. New paradigm for progress: National leadership is necessary but not adequate to combat nature loss. A whole-of-society approach is needed: subnational governments, science institutions, community-based organizations, and the business sector all need to be involved to achieve 30x30 and other Framework goals. While the UN COP process works well for negotiations among national governments, it’s not built to speed-up implementation of what’s been agreed to.

That’s why we’re working directly with other governments through multilateral efforts like the High Ambition Coalition Subnational Taskforce and Mediterranean Climate Partnership. It’s also why we’ve worked to build an inclusive 30x30 movement in our own state.

My Catalonian colleague Marc Vilahur-Chiaraviglio reflected that protecting and restoring nature across the planet and achieving 30x30 involves complexity, uncertainty and urgency. I couldn’t agree more. That’s why we need to continue to act boldly, while we learn all we can and refine our efforts. I’m so proud to be part of this movement in California and across the world.