To the average person in the Northern hemisphere, November is a vibe shift: undeniable crispness in the air, pumpkin spice everything, darkness before six in the evening. To climate nerds, November is COP (Conference of the Parties) season: long-winded speeches, interminable nights filled with battles over bracketed legal text, fights over finance that seem soul-crushingly familiar. Then there’s the new generation of protesters reminding world leaders who attend the UN climate conference that they need to step up and do justice outside these corridors.
But this year there will be not one, but two COPs within one month of each other: one for nature in Montreal, Canada (7-18 November); and the other for the climate in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt (7-19 December). Both the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the Framework Convention on Climate Change were born at the iconic Rio Earth Summit of 1992, and although they later diverged with their own specialist streams of international law, science and activism, the overlap between them remains undeniable. Climate change is driving habitat destruction and more extreme weather, while biodiversity loss from human activity, such as deforestation, is exacerbating climate change.
