The Guardian

The inside story of what happened on the first two days of the biodiversity summit in Montreal

Wednesday, 7 December

Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s pledge of C$800m (£510m) over seven years to support Indigenous-led conservation projects was preceded by a ceremony led by the First Nations Elder, Ka’nahsohon Kevin Deer. It made a change from the day before when Trudeau was interrupted by Indigenous protesters at the opening ceremony.

The UN secretary general António Guterres spoke powerfully about the need to protect the rights of environment protesters, saying “human rights must be at the centre of all environmental concerns and namely, the work of the [UN convention on biodiversity] CBD”.

A new draft text of the Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) is littered with more than 1,000 brackets, which will need dealing with over the next two weeks. The text has been described as a “mess”, with many concerned about the amount that still needs to be done.

Despite more than 20 targets being negotiated, the 30x30 goal to protect 30% of land and oceans by 2030 is stealing the limelight. As delegates arrived at Montreal airport, there was no escaping the slew of posters promoting the ambition.

Both Canada and China have given delegates welcome bags – the former contained a snood, and the latter, a silk scarf and tea. Masks are also back and each day delegates are taking Covid tests in order to get into the conference centre.

The EU representative Ladislav Miko criticised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, saying it brings about “long-term environmental degradation”. Russian delegate Denis Rebrikov responded by saying the subject should be outside the scope of the biodiversity summit. “It’s hard to avoid the impression that these countries are deliberately trying to sabotage the adoption of a global framework,” he said.

It’s currently 3C in Montreal and some delegates are struggling with the cold. One was seen wearing a thick coat and woolly hat with headphones over the top in the main plenary hall.

West Cumbria Mining, which set up Whitehaven office during push for new mine, owned by EMR Capital

• What is the Cumbrian coalmine and why does it matter?

The first deep coalmine to be dug in the UK in a generation is ultimately owned by an international private equity company, with executives whose mining interests have stretched to Russia, Asia, Africa and across Australia.

West Cumbria Mining positioned itself as a local company with an office in Whitehaven, and promised it would provide jobs for people in the area, during its campaign for permission to extract 2.8m tonnes of coking coal a year from the site.

Serious pollution, poor service and weak financial management embedded, says England and Wales water industry regulator

Serious pollution by water companies has increased in the past year, the regulator has said in a damning report on the performance of the sector in England and Wales.

Ofwat said poor performance by some firms was embedded, and named Northumbrian Water, Southern Water, South West Water, Thames Water, Welsh Water and Yorkshire Water as lagging in the way they served customers and ran the system.

Nearly 5,000 primary school students took part in the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Wild at Art competition, which invites children to create an artwork depicting one of the country’s threatened native animals or plants

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The mass-scale removal of resources is a key driver of biodiversity loss. Extractivism’s grip on the planet must be broken

At the biodiversity Cop taking place in Montreal, much attention will focus on a policy proposal calling for 30% of the planet’s land and oceans to be protected by 2030, known as 30x30. Protected areas have their place in addressing the biodiversity crisis, but we also know that they are insufficient. Since the 1970s, they have increased fourfold globally, expanding to about 17% of the planet, but extraction rates have more than tripled. This unrelenting expansion of forestry, mining, monoculture farming and fossil fuel developments is a central driver of biodiversity loss. Ending or at least reducing “extractivism” must be front and centre at Cop15.

Extractivism is more than extraction. Extraction is the not inherently damaging removal of matter from nature and its transformation into things useful to humans. Extractivism, a term born of anti-colonial struggle and thought in the Americas, is a mode of accumulation based on hyper-extraction with lopsided benefits and costs: concentrated mass-scale removal of resources primarily for export, with benefits largely accumulating far from the sites of extraction. One estimate puts the drain south to north at a staggering $10tn (£8tn) a year.

Canada’s prime minister calls on China, Russia and Brazil to expand protected areas for nature

Justin Trudeau has urged China, Russia, Brazil and other large countries to massively expand protected areas for nature at Cop15 while putting Indigenous rights at the heart of conservation, as momentum gathers behind a controversial target to conserve 30% of Earth.

On Wednesday, the Canadian prime minister committed C$800m (£510m) of funding over seven years for Indigenous-led conservation projects in his country across an area the size of Egypt, starting a “story of reconciliation” with Indigenous peoples.

Experts create guide to help save seabirds from bleak future caused by global heating

The majority of puffin nesting sites in western Europe are likely to be lost by the end of the century due to climate breakdown, a report has warned.

Other seabirds will also be affected unless urgent action to limit global heating is taken, with razorbills and arctic terns forecast to lose 80% and 87% of their breeding grounds respectively owing to reduced food accessibility and prolonged periods of stormy weather.

Cumbrian MP questions decision for site as he likens plans to ‘opening of a Betamax factory’

Ministers giving the green light to Britain’s first coalmine in 30 years is “like celebrating the opening of a Betamax factory”, Cumbrian MP Tim Farron has said.

Farron, whose constituency borders the one where the new project will be built in Copeland, called the decision “daft” because there was “an evaporation of demand” for the coking coal the new mine will produce.

For more than a decade UK-based photographer Mandy Barker has been travelling the world and creating stark images of marine debris in a black ocean that aim to raise awareness of pollution of our seas. A touring gallery of her work will be on show at Gallery Oldham, Greater Manchester, from 10 December to 11 March 2023

Extinct & Endangered: Insects in Peril, an exhibition by Levon Biss in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History, has been turned into a book. Shining a light upon insect decline and biodiversity, his photographs are created from up to 10,000 individual images using microscope lenses and contain microscopic levels of detail to provide the audience with a unique visual experience.

The book Extinct & Endangered: Insects in Peril (Abrams, £35) is out 8 December.

Photographs by Levon Biss and text by American Museum of Natural History

Mine could affect Britain’s climate commitments, which some believe could help get decision struck down

The government has given the green light to a new coalmine in Cumbria, the first in the UK for more than 30 years, but already moves have begun to challenge the decision before construction work can start.

Climate campaigners are examining the decision with a view to a legal challenge, based on the UK’s national and international legally binding climate commitments.

Report from chief medical officer Prof Chris Whitty finds air pollution kills up to 36,000 people a year in England

“Ecodesign” wood burning stoves produce 450 times more toxic air pollution than gas central heating, according to new data published in a report from Prof Chris Whitty, the chief medical officer for England.

Older stoves, now banned from sale, produce 3,700 times more, while electric heating produces none, the report said.

Climate crisis increases risks for subsistence farmers in Africa who usually work throughout pregnancy

Rising temperatures driven by climate breakdown are causing distress to the foetuses of pregnant farmers, who are among the worst affected by global heating.

A study revealed that the foetuses of women working in fields in the Gambia showed concerning rises in heart rates and reductions in the blood flow to the placenta as conditions became hotter. The women, who do much of the agricultural labour and work throughout pregnancy, told the scientists that temperatures had noticeably increased in the past decade.

Letter urges sponsors provide ‘corporate climate political influencing statements’ after 630 lobbyists attend Cop27

Senior Democratic senators have written to the head of the United Nations warning that public trust in global negotiations on climate action is at risk because of the scale of corporate lobbying – and new controls are needed.

Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Ben Cardin of Maryland and Ed Markey of Massachusetts have sent a letter to António Gutierres, the UN secretary general, urging the UN to require sponsors and participants at future climate conferences to provide “audited corporate climate political influencing statements”.

Leading researchers say the UN biodiversity summit is ‘vastly more important’ than the recent Cop27 climate meeting

The “fate of the entire living world” will be determined at the Cop15 UN biodiversity summit, according to leading scientists.

They said the gathering of the world’s nations, which began on Wednesday in Montreal, is “vastly more important than Cop27”, the recent high-profile UN climate meeting. “We say this because of the many dimensions of anthropogenic global change … the most critical, complex and challenging is that of biodiversity loss,” the researchers said.

Locals desperate for lower bills, jobs and economic revival have been seduced by this plan, but they – and we – will suffer

Today, the government has thrown its weight behind a climate-busting, backward-looking coalmine in Cumbria. The staggering hypocrisy of demanding other countries phase down coal, just when we’re phasing it back in again, sends a truly terrible message to global south countries and marks this decision as a climate crime against humanity.

Given this, you’d be forgiven for wondering why a new coalmine appears to have garnered local support. Areas such as Whitehaven in west Cumbria have been told it will “level up” the community – bringing lower bills, more jobs and economic revival to areas that have severely lacked all three for generations. So when a private coal company turned up, the community, understandably nostalgic for its more prosperous past, bit their arm off.

Michael Gove greenlights £165m project that will produce estimated 400,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year

The UK will build its first new coalmine for three decades at Whitehaven in Cumbria, despite objections locally, across the UK and from around the world.

Michael Gove, the levelling-up secretary, gave the green light for the project on Wednesday, paving the way for an estimated investment of £165m that will create about 500 new jobs in the region and produce 2.8m tonnes of coking coal a year, largely for steelmaking.

As the government uses draconian laws to crack down on individuals, we must find new ways to protest and keep the public on side

The battle between climate protesters and the government is raging, and most people know who is in the right. The people trying to sound the alarm about the climate crisis are closer to mainstream opinion than those enabling fossil fuel corporations to make almost $3bn a day in profit while the planet burns.

Many in the government probably know it too, but to openly confront that reality would mean doing the unthinkable: pointing to corporate short-termism as the source of the crisis.

Star Trek prepared me to feel a connection with the universe. Instead, I felt terrible grief for our planet. At Cop15, our leaders must negotiate to protect it

Last year, at the age of 90, I had a life-changing experience. I went to space, after decades of playing a science-fiction character who was exploring the universe and building connections with many diverse life forms and cultures. I thought I would experience a similar feeling: a feeling of deep connection with the immensity around us, a deep call for endless exploration. A call to indeed boldly go where no one had gone before.

I was absolutely wrong. As I explained in my latest book, what I felt was totally different. I knew that many before me had experienced a greater sense of care while contemplating our planet from above, because they were struck by the apparent fragility of this suspended blue marble. I felt that too. But the strongest feeling, dominating everything else by far, was the deepest grief that I had ever experienced.

Pressure is increasing on world leaders to make progress at the UN biodiversity summit – but the pile of unfinished tasks is mounting

All procrastinators know the feeling: an enormous task is not close to being finished, time is slipping away and the pressure to act has become impossible to ignore. But despite the mounting unease, there is still not yet enough pressure to take action, and it is unclear if there ever will be.

At the Palais des congrès de Montréal convention centre at Cop15, after more than two years of delays, there is a sense that governments tasked with agreeing this decade’s targets for protecting life on Earth are in just such a situation.