Every country is negotiating a plan to save nature. Except the US.
The United States is, by many measures, a global environmental leader — barring four years under former President Donald 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.
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.
