Federal Environment Minister Steffi Lemke (Greens) has warned against watering down the most important goal in the ongoing negotiations for a new global agreement on nature. The goal of putting 30 percent of land and sea under protection in the future must be backed up with clear quality criteria, Lemke said on Thursday on the sidelines of the World Conference on Nature in Montreal. It must not happen that this goal is decided, but then each state decides for itself what is meant by protection. “We have to agree on a basic understanding of these protected areas,” said Lemke. On the one hand, according to their understanding, protected areas do not mean that no human use at all should take place within these areas. At the same time, clear criteria must ensure that an adequate level of protection is guaranteed. “They must not only exist on paper, as pure paper parks,” warned the Green politician.
Lemke announced that she would personally work to ensure that so-called zero-use zones were also set up within the 30 percent protection areas. These are areas where, for example, no fishing can take place. This is important to enable animal populations to regenerate.
The 30 percent protected area target and in particular the question of whether particularly strictly protected areas such as zero-use zones should also be set up therein is one of the most hotly contested negotiation points in Montreal. Around 115 states, including all EU member states, have joined forces in a “coalition of the ambitious” to achieve the goal, also known as 30×30. However, many governments are trying to achieve a weakening in the current negotiations.
Developing countries should receive financial compensation
During the negotiations the night before, a passage was deleted that explicitly called for “strict protection” in some of the future protected areas. The representative of the EU did not raise any objection to this either. Other passages providing “highest and full” protection status for part of the future network of protected areas are marked as disputed in parentheses.
The question of whether the area of the desired protected areas will remain at 30 percent – as proposed in the draft contract – has not been finally clarified. The ministers of the 196 member states of the UN Biodiversity Conference COP15 will have to make the final decision on this key issue for a successful agreement in the coming days.
Lemke will start negotiating with her colleagues on Thursday. For Germany, the German Environment Minister has set as a goal, in addition to achieving the protected area goal, sufficient and fair financial compensation for the developing countries in which a large part of the biodiversity protection has to be done because they still have a lot of intact nature. According to scientific analysis, effectively protecting 30 percent of the planet could save most of the animal and plant species that are currently threatened from extinction.