COP16 UN Biodiversity negotiations: Why the US won’t join this key treaty to save nature

The United States is, by many measures, a global environmental leader — barring four years under former President Trump. It has some of the strongest environmental laws in the world, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. The country invests billions of dollars to fight climate change and wildlife declines. And it produces much of the world’s leading environmental research.

For the most part, the country prides itself on these environmental achievements.

That’s what makes this so surprising: The US is the only nation in the world, other than the Vatican, that hasn’t joined the most important global treaty to conserve nature. The treaty, known as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), isn’t just some inconsequential agreement. The Convention is designed to safeguard Earth’s life support systems, its animals and ecosystems — a mission that requires global cooperation.

The Convention achieved one of its most important accomplishments in 2022 when its member countries agreed on a groundbreaking new deal to halt biodiversity loss by 2030, called the Global Biodiversity Framework. The deal has 23 targets, including conserving at least 30 percent of land and oceans and reducing annual subsidies that harm ecosystems by at least $500 billion. Experts hailed it as the Paris Agreement for nature, the global treaty to combat climate change.

This week and next, officials from those member countries are meeting in Cali, Colombia, at an event known as COP16 to formally review their progress. They’ll also negotiate a handful of other issues including how to manage genetic data from plants and animals that’s stored in open-access databases.

A senior State Department official told Vox that the US government is sending a sizable delegation to Cali including technical experts. But while the delegation will try to influence the negotiations, it won’t have a formal say in any outcomes. So, for example, if countries come up with a plan to manage genetic data, the US won’t be able to formally object if it doesn’t agree with the terms.

Experts say this is a problem. Fixing the biodiversity crisis is an enormous task, and one that requires reforming entire industries and financial flows that harm nature, such as industrial agriculture and the subsidies that uphold it. As the planet’s largest economy, the US has a lot of control over those industries.

So why isn’t it at the negotiating table?

Nearly half a century ago, scientists were already warning that scores of species were at risk of going extinct — just as they are today. In fact, headlines from the time are eerily familiar: “Scientists say a million species are in danger,” read one in 1981, which is almost identical to a headline from 2019.

Those concerns ignited a series of meetings among environmental groups and UN officials, in the ’80s and early ’90s, that laid the groundwork for a treaty to protect biodiversity. US diplomats were very much involved in these discussions, said William Snape III, an environmental lawyer and an assistant dean at American University and senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group.

“It was the United States who championed the idea of a Biodiversity Treaty in the 1980s, and was influential in getting the effort off the ground in the early 1990s,” Snape wrote in the journal Sustainable Development Law & Policy in 2010.

In the summer of 1992, CBD opened for signature at a big UN conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It laid out three goals: conserve biodiversity (from genes to ecosystems), use its components in a sustainable way, and share the various benefits of genetic resources fairly.

Dozens of countries signed the agreement then and there, including the UK, China, and Canada. But the US — then under President George H.W. Bush — was notably not one of them. And it largely came down to politics: It was an election year that pitted Bush against then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, and a number of senators in Bush’s party opposed signing the treaty, citing a wide range of concerns.

Among them was a fear that US biotech companies would have to share their intellectual property related to genetics with other countries. There were also widespread concerns that the US would be responsible for helping poorer nations — financially and otherwise — protect their natural resources and that the agreement would put more environmental regulations in place in the US. (At the time, there was already pushback among the timber industry and property rights groups on existing environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.)

Some industries also opposed signing. As environmental lawyer Robert Blomquist wrote in a 2002 article for the Golden Gate University Law Review, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association and Industrial Biotechnology Association both sent letters to Bush stating that they were opposed to the US signing CBD due to concerns related to intellectual property rights.

In 1992, Clinton won the election and, in a move hailed by conservationists, signed the treaty shortly after taking office. But there was still a major hurdle to joining CBD: ratification by the Senate, which requires 67 votes.

Clinton was well aware of the CBD opposition in Congress. So when he sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification in 1993, he included with it seven “understandings” that sought to dispel concerns related to IP and sovereignty. Essentially, they make it clear that, as party to the agreement, the US would not be forced to do anything, and it would retain sovereignty over its natural resources, Snape writes. Clinton also emphasized that the US already had strong environmental laws and wouldn’t need to create more of them to meet CBD’s goals.

In a promising step, the bipartisan Senate Foreign Relations Committee overwhelmingly recommended that the Senate ratify the treaty, making it seem all but certain to pass. At that point, the biotech industry had also thrown its support behind the agreement, Blomquist wrote.

Nonetheless, then-GOP Sens. Jesse Helms and Bob Dole, along with many of their colleagues, blocked ratification of the convention from ever coming to a vote, Snape said, repeating the same arguments. The treaty languished on the Senate floor.

And that pretty much brings us up to speed: No president has introduced the treaty for ratification since.

Three decades later, concerns related to American sovereignty persist, especially within the Republican Party, and keep the US out of treaties. Conservative lawmakers stand in the way of not only CBD but also several other treaties awaiting ratification by the Senate, including the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities.

“Conservative nationalists in the United States (including the Senate) have long mistrusted international agreements,” Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox in 2021. They view them, he added, “as efforts by the United Nations and foreign governments to impose constraints on US constitutional independence, interfere with US private sector activity, as well as create redistributionist schemes.”

In other words, not a whole lot has changed.

In 2021, a week after Biden was sworn into office, the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, published a report calling on the Senate to oppose a handful of treaties while he’s in office, “on the grounds that they threaten the sovereignty of the United States.” They include CBD, the Arms Trade Treaty, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, among others. (Environmental treaties like CBD tend to draw a stronger opposition from conservative lawmakers, who often fear environmental regulations, relative to other agreements, Snape said.)

Legal experts say concerns related to sovereignty aren’t justified. The agreement spells out that countries retain jurisdiction over their own environment. Indeed, US negotiators made sure of it when helping craft the agreement in the ’90s, Patrick wrote in World Politics Review in 2021. “States have … the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies,” reads Article 3 of CBD. (Article 3 goes on to say that states are also responsible for making sure they don’t harm the environment in other countries.)

“The convention poses no threat to U.S. sovereignty,” wrote Patrick, author of The Sovereignty Wars.

And what about the other concerns? The agreement stipulates that any transfer of genetic technology to poorer nations must adhere to IP rights in wealthier nations, Patrick writes. Clinton’s seven understandings also affirmed that joining CBD wouldn’t weaken American IP rights and clarified that the treaty can’t force the US to contribute a certain amount of financial resources.

Joining the CBD is also unlikely to require anything in the way of new domestic environmental policies, Snape and Patrick said. “The U.S. is already in compliance with the treaty’s substantive terms: It possesses a highly developed system of protected natural areas, and has policies in place to reduce biodiversity loss in environmentally sensitive areas,” Patrick wrote.

The US says it embraces the objectives of the Convention — i.e., conserving and sharing the benefits of nature — and worked hard to bring about an ambitious Global Biodiversity Framework.

The State Department told Vox that it endorses that framework with the exception of a few of its targets related, unsurprisingly, to the private sector. Those include reducing government subsidies that harm the environment and increasing spending on foreign aid for conservation. That’s partly because decisions regarding government spending require congressional approval. US representatives can’t unilaterally agree to financial targets.

This brings us, again, to what is ultimately the barrier to stronger US environmental action: Congress. Reforming industries that harm nature and funding conservation will require approval from a heavily divided Congress, as will joining the Convention on Biological Diversity.

For the foreseeable future, the votes are just not there.

And should former President Trump win the election next month, the prospect of joining CBD will only become more grim, Patrick said. Some of the targets under the Global Biodiversity Framework — such as the goal to conserve 30 percent of US land — are “totally anathema to any potential Trump administration,” he said.

That ultimately makes it harder for the Convention, this life-sustaining treaty, to get anything done.

“The world is in the throes of an ecological emergency,” Patrick said. “Given the scale of that, it’s embarrassing to have the United States be AWOL. It just undermines what is already a really heavy lift.”