Nnimmo Bassey, a Nigerian environmental activist and director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), has described the outcome of the just concluded biodiversity meeting in Montreal, Canada, as “a mix bag of soothing and troubling pieces”.

In a chat with FIJ on Wednesday, Bassey said while a few decisions of the two-week meeting deserved an applaud, there had been a move to ensure African negotiators lost out in the end.

“The biotech industry particularly tried to push African negotiators to work with Brazil to remove or water down precautionary language from the text,” he said.

“Weakening precaution in the CBD will be tragic for Africa as risky manipulations such as gene drives and synthetic biology would ride roughshod over the interests of the people. It would also be a turning of the table against the very things that African negotiators had fought for in the past.”

Bassey, a 2009 Time Hero of the Environment, said the $30 billion per year COP15 projected in international funding for developed nations’ conservation efforts by 2030 could hardly make a difference.

“Impacted countries, including African nations, believe that hundreds of billions of dollars are needed annually to close the biodiversity gap and what is on offer is a promise of minuscule amounts,” he said.

“Keeping in mind what obtains on the climate change negotiations, it should be clear that the rich countries are playing games with the poor.”

The fifteenth conference of the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) ended Monday in Canada with the adoption of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), a new action pack for protecting nature.

Also called the Kumming-Montreal agreement, the GBF is aimed at halting and reversing the world’s biodiversity loss by 2030 through the conservation of at least 30 percent of the world’s land and ocean, partnership with indigenous peoples and local communities, and increased international funding for conservation efforts in developing nations.

While world leaders have described the outcome, especially the goal of conserving 30 percent of the world’s land and ocean, as “wonderful news”, Bassey said it called for concerns.

“If 30 percent of the world is sliced and packaged for conservation, we may expect to hear the echoes of the infamous Berlin Conference of 1884 at which Africa was carved up and grabbed by imperial/colonial powers,” he said.

“In other words, unless there is constant vigilance on this score, we could see a rise of biodiversity colonialism just like the carbon colonialism that accompanies carbon trading and related offset notions.”

He, however, said that the recommendation of agro-ecology approaches for biodiversity preservation and the exclusion of ‘nature positive’ from the final text of the GBF were good news from the COP.

“By not including ‘nature positive’ in the outcome text, the CBD saved the world from getting cornered into another net zero non-solution that only works for the accounts books of marketers of nature,” said Bassey. “The systems of nature are much too complex to be squeezed into the narrow frames of any accountant’s balance sheets.”

Bassey said the challenges facing the world’s climate and biodiversity could not be tackled with the same old mindsets of the COPs.

“The present multilateral spaces are simply colonial in nature and are incapable of solving these existential problems. The CBD crawls with billionaires and philanthro-capitalists who seek to bleed every tragedy for cash,” he said.

Meanwhile, a group of civil societies from the global south are calling on the Colombian government to organise a World Climate Summit of Mother Earth in the year 2023 because the COPs have failed to bring hope.

In a request form seen by FIJ, the group, under the aegis of the Ecosocial and Intercultural Pact of the South, says needed changes cannot come “from the current multilateral architecture”.

“Social inequalities have worsened and CO2 emissions continue to rise. In the name of ‘energy security’, the European Union has enabled all kinds of dirty energy, which has further emboldened extractivist governments in the North and South to deepen maldevelopment programs, thus continuing their steady race towards planetary eco ide,” the request form reads in part.

Bassey, who is a signatory to the call for a Colombia summit, said “the world urgently needs popular and autonomous reorganisation of efforts away from the current hoaxes”.

He said, “An example of such efforts is what the government of Bolivia hosted in Cochabamba in April 2010 after the Copenhagen COP15 fiasco. Civil society groups from across the world are currently requesting the government of Colombia to host a similar meeting in that country. Africa needs to support such initiatives, otherwise the continent will continue to attend these COPs with empty bowls and get off with mere coins.”

This story was produced as part of a virtual grant for CBD COP15 hosted by Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.