The lead-up to COP30 has been dominated by pessimism about the prospects for a breakthrough on climate change. Yet as Florian Rabitz, Simon Beaudoin, Christian Prip, Theresa Jedd, Guilherme de Queiroz Stein, Elsa Tsioumani and Ina Lehmann write, recent international agreements on biodiversity offer a rare source of optimism for environmental governance.
These are challenging times for multilateral environmental diplomacy. In August 2025, negotiations on an international plastics treaty faltered, despite overwhelming evidence of the adverse impacts of plastic pollution on the environment and human health. In October, governments failed to adopt, despite years of work, an international instrument on greenhouse gas emissions from international shipping.
At present, COP30 is convening in Belém, Brazil, with expectations being modest at best, and any outcome that does not involve comprehensive sabotage by the US administration probably already constituting a success. As multiple and interlocking global environmental crises escalate, global environmental governance is decidedly not up to the task.
A shimmer of light
Yet there may be a shimmer of light. Over the last three years, international institutions for global biodiversity governance have improved in terms of political ambition and institutional innovation.
In 2022, the parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework as a strategic plan for enhancing conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, and for ensuring that benefits associated with the biotechnological utilisation of certain biological materials and genetic information are shared in a fair and equitable manner.
The Global Biodiversity Framework serves as the benchmark for international biodiversity related efforts for the 2022-2030 period. It includes 23 action-oriented targets for 2030, including an ambitious 30×30 target, which aims to establish 30% of the globe’s land and sea area as protected areas by 2030 while better protecting the rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in and around these areas.
The 16th Conference of the Parties to the CBD (CBD COP16) achieved further breakthroughs. It established a new standing body for the inclusion and participation of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities in the CBD’s processes and created a new mechanism for channelling commercial profits from the use of digital sequence information (DSI) (e.g. in biotechnological research or genomic AI development) into nature protection. CBD COP16 also made remarkable progress on thorny issues related to biodiversity finance, as well as planning, monitoring, reporting and review in the context of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
Global biodiversity governance
Other international institutions have seen similarly encouraging developments on biodiversity. A notable milestone is the 2023 Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), a new international treaty addressing biodiversity in the high seas. It is also the first agreement to create a binding legal instrument for the fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the use of digital sequence information on marine genetic resources.
From now on, commercial users of digital sequence information, including industry giants such as BASF, will be expected to share monetary and non-monetary benefits derived from their commercialisation of sequence information for products in sectors such as pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.
Under the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, a process is currently in motion that could create a similar benefit-sharing mechanism for digital sequence information used in agriculture and plant breeding. The Cali Fund created at CBD COP 16 aims to stimulate fair and equitable benefit-sharing from the use of digital sequence information through voluntary financial transfers from multinational companies relying on biodiversity to stewards at the national and local level.
We are also seeing encouraging developments on the prohibition of deep-sea mining. The ocean floor and its subsoil is known to hold large deposits of critical minerals, and interest in commercial exploitation is growing. There is a risk that deep-sea mining could have devastating impacts on marine biodiversity.
Within the International Seabed Authority, there is now a broad coalition of governments and civil society organisations working towards a moratorium or outright ban. The Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Migratory Species recently weighed in on the debate, arguing in favour of a moratorium due to the likely impacts of deep-sea mining on marine life.
A turning point?
Compared to other issue areas of global environmental governance, there has thus been remarkable progress in the realm of biodiversity. The question is whether this is a genuine turning point, and if implementation efforts will be adequate to meet the ambitious targets.
Recent developments suggest that there may be storm clouds on the horizon for the 17th Conference of the Parties to the CBD, which will convene in Yerevan, Armenia, in October 2026 to perform a first stock take of progress towards the 2030 targets of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
At the 27th meeting of the CBD’s Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical, and Technological Advice, convening in Panama City in October 2025, a handful of governments blocked progress on key agenda items, including risk assessment for living modified organisms, and on the integration of the scientific assessments of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services into the CBD’s processes.
This political posturing reminds us that, in the politics of global sustainability, success is hard to win and easy to lose. Yet as the global biodiversity crisis keeps unfolding, threatening livelihoods and endangering the future of societies and entire ecosystems, one can only hope that governments will recognise their common interest in a healthy global environment.
For more information, see the authors’ accompanying paper in Environmental Politics.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors, not the position of EUROPP – European Politics and Policy or the London School of Economics. Featured image credit: blickwinkel2511 / Shutterstock.com
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