AICHI TARGETS - ENVIRONMENT
News: Why
have countries failed to meet their biodiversity goals?
What's in the news?
● Delegates
from 196 countries - Parties to the
United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) are meeting in Montreal,
Canada from December 7-21 with the aim to hammer out a new global agreement
on halting environmental loss.
Key takeaways:
● Many
of the 24 conservation targets under discussion at the 15th Conference of the
Parties (COP15) aim to avoid past mistakes and improve on the world’s last set
of conservation goals - the Aichi
Biodiversity Targets that expired in 2020.
● No single country met all
20 Aichi Targets within its own borders, according to a September 2020 UN
assessment.
Aichi Targets:
● The
Aichi Targets, adopted during the 2010
CBD summit in Nagoya, located in Japan’s Aichi prefecture, included goals
such as reducing deforestation by at
least half during the coming decade and curbing pollution so that it no longer
harmed ecosystems.
● After
parties adopted the Aichi Targets, they were expected to devise their own
national biodiversity strategies that would mimic the goals laid out by Aichi.
● Nearly
all parties created these strategies, but most were never fully implemented.
To what extent were the Aichi Targets met?
● The
most notable Aichi objective aimed to
protect or conserve 17% of all land and inland waters and 10% of the ocean by
the end of the decade.
● While
some progress was made toward that goal, the world ultimately fell short. Today
about 15% of the world’s land and 8% of ocean territories are under some form
of protection, though the level of protection varies.
● About
10% of the targets saw no significant progress, the assessment found.
● Six
of the targets, including the land and ocean conservation target, were deemed
“partially achieved”.
● “At
a global level, none of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets were met or achieved,
but we also know that some progress was made at the national level in a number
of countries,” said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the CBD.
● In
the end, Aichi was deemed a failure by the United Nations and the CBD
secretariat called on parties to come up with another guiding document to
direct conservation efforts through 2030 and beyond.
Why did the Aichi Targets fail?
● A
lack of clearly defined metrics by
which to gauge progress made the Aichi goals tough to implement.
● A
lack of financing to help developing
countries meet the Aichi goals was also an obstacle to their success.