The United Nations Biodiversity Conference COP15 in Montreal, Canada aims to establish a new global framework to halt the biodiversity loss and ensure that by 2050, society and nature will be “living in harmony.”

What is COP15?

The UN Biodiversity Conference first started in 1992 at the Earth Summit in Rio. This year’s conference is expected to bring together representatives from nearly 200 governments to decide on new targets for protecting and preserving nature. This once-in-a-decade opportunity aims to ensure the survival of species nearing extinction while holding countries accountable for their participation in the depletion of biodiversity.

Objective

The largest anticipation of what’s to come out of COP15 is the decision on “30 by 30.” The proposal asks countries to commit to protecting 30% of the world’s land and sea by 2030. There are a few strategies for how this can be implemented:

• Making nature-positive practices mandatory amongst global organizations
• Requiring businesses to track and disclose their impact on biodiversity, in the same way that fossil fuel emissions are regulated
• Biocredits, hoping to boost conservation financing where carbon offsets have so far failed

COP15 is also hoping to come to an agreement on what the long-term goals look like and what would need to be accomplished by 2050. It is likely that all countries would have to agree on not only stopping but reversing the loss of biodiversity by enhancing our ecosystems and reducing the number of extinctions.

Challenges

This year’s conference has already faced obstacles and is expected to only continue to be more difficult to establish and set the needed targets:

• Pandemic set back
  • COVID-19 has caused a two year delay to the once every decade schedule of meeting to set targets. Leaving us with even less time to prepare for and launch targets that are expected to be met in the next seven years
• Limited coverage
  • COP15 does not gain the same attention in the media as last month’s climate change convention, COP27. Impact on biodiversity has been snubbed as the ‘lesser evil’ compared to the climate crisis
• Falling short
  • The previous convention, COP10 in Aichi, Japan set targets to cut the rate at which species were being lost in half while expanding protected habitats on land and sea by 2020; however, all governments failed to meet a single target. According to the WWF, the rate of nature is declining faster than ever, plunging an average of 69%.

What can be done?

Causes of extinction and habitat loss largely stem from greenhouse gas emissions and chemical pollution. In the United States, the transportation sector is the largest producer of greenhouse gas emissions. We have started to see an increased interest in alternative solutions and technologies to grow away from using diesel or gasoline to power our cars, trucks, ships, and planes. The most explored options have been through the use of electricity and hydrogen to power vehicles.

While demand for hydrogen is growing, most of the demand has yet to be realized. There is no shortage of potential users for green hydrogen, but there is a lack of access to green hydrogen sources. GenHydro’s technology is aimed at developing scalable and affordable green hydrogen supply to become part of the global solution to lowering carbon emissions.

Over the next two weeks we will be keeping up with results of COP15, follow along with us on social media.

Contact us today for more information on our green hydrogen and renewable energy technology.