This October more than 12,000 dignitaries, heads of state, delegates, and biodiversity experts from nearly 200 nations will gather in Colombia for COP16, the 2024 United Nations Biodiversity Conference of the Parties.
This is the first Biodiversity COP since the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity — CBD for short — adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, a landmark agreement to protect 30% of the planet by 2030. As a key driver of habitat destruction and other threats to wildlife, animal agriculture is the leading cause of biodiversity loss. So one would expect that the menu at a global conference tasked with protecting biodiversity would align with the science and serve plant-based food instead of meat and dairy.
Yet previous Biodiversity COP gatherings haven’t done that.
When people plan meals, whether it’s for a family potluck or a global conference, we make decisions that represent our values as well as our taste. That’s why the Center for Biological Diversity, with a coalition of other biodiversity champions, has written a letter urging the CBD secretariat and Colombia organizers to ensure the food served at COP16 is plant based. We’re also asking that all food is farmed sustainably and equitably using agroecological practices and — where possible — that it comes from local farms.
Join us in taking action: Write your own letter urging COP16 to serve plant-based menus.
The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted at COP15, which guides how countries will halt and reverse nature loss, reaffirms the need to reduce animal consumption.
That need is also identified in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Global Species Action Plan, as well as by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which identified meat reduction as a vital — and urgently needed — climate mitigation strategy.
Agricultural destruction is most clearly seen in habitat loss and degradation — agriculture accounts for 80% of global land-use change. This destruction happens when areas are converted to crops or pasture for livestock to graze, ever narrowing the few remaining spaces for wild animals to live.
The world’s most biodiverse regions are being destroyed, often to meet demand for beef in other countries, like the United States. South American tropical forests are being rapidly consumed by cattle ranching and to produce feed crops for cattle, while Southeast Asia is slashed apart for palm oil.
Back here in the United States, our outsized appetite for meat degrades landscapes and watersheds with manure pollution and puts hundreds of thousands of native animals in the crosshairs for ranching interests.
Many years ago, I described the fight to protect a biodiversity hotspot in my neck of the woods, the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument along the Oregon-California border.
The monument is a protected area that’s home to 135 species of butterflies, along with mountain lions, bobcats, endangered gray owls, rare redband trout and hundreds of species of birds. It’s also a vital wildlife corridor for wolves (including the famous OR-7) and other migrating animals.
