A landmark global goal to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 is close to slipping beyond reach – and may have not been achievable when it was set in 2022, according to a former UK lead negotiator.
Will Lockhart OBE represented the UK in UN nature negotiations from 2021 until the end of COP16 talks in Rome in February of this year.
He tells Carbon Brief that the agreement of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) in Canada in 2022 was a “huge personal highlight” that made nature “frontpage news”.
But when asked about whether it is possible to reverse the rapid decline of biodiversity in just five years – the headline “mission” of the GBF, commonly referred to as the “Paris Agreement for nature” – he says:
“The trajectory right now would suggest, no, it’s looking incredibly hard to achieve. But…with exactly the right interventions at exactly the right scale, it might still be possible.
“A fair question might be was it ever possible?…There has always been a contested evidence base about whether it could ever have been achieved.”
Shortly after the GBF was agreed in 2022, Carbon Brief spoke to a range of biologists who expressed doubt that it would be possible to totally reverse the decline of nature over such a timescale.
Earlier this year, Carbon Brief and the Guardian published an investigation finding that more than half of countries who have submitted plans to the UN failed to commit to protecting 30% of their territories for nature – one of the key levers for reversing biodiversity loss.
Countries have never fully met any target to help nature since the UN biodiversity convention was established in the 1990s.
The world’s biodiversity is declining at a faster rate than at any other time in recorded history. Around one million animal and plant species already face extinction.
Aiming high
The GBF is a global agreement with an aim to “halt and reverse biodiversity loss” by 2030 and achieve “harmony with nature” by 2050.
To help achieve its aims, the GBF sets out 23 targets for countries covering a wide range of topics, from protecting and restoring ecosystems to slashing subsidies for activities harmful to nature and providing funding to developing countries.
The GBF follows the Aichi targets, the previous set of UN goals for tackling nature loss by 2020 that ended in collective failure.
Towards the end of the 2010s – as it became clear that the Aichi targets were likely to fail – a flurry of research papers were published examining what it would take to “bend the curve” on biodiversity loss.
Among the most influential was a 2018 commentary in Nature Sustainability, led by the late pioneering biodiversity scientist Prof Georgina Mace. It urged countries to “clearly specify the goal for biodiversity recovery” in their post-2020 agreement for nature, “analogous to the [UN climate change] 1.5-2C target”.
On biodiversity loss, Mace and her team wrote:
“This declining trend must not only be halted, but also reversed.”
The post-2020 agreement for nature – covering the decade from 2021 to 2030 – was meant to be finalised in 2020. However, the Covid-19 pandemic caused the COP15 biodiversity summit to be postponed several times, before it was eventually held in two parts, starting in October 2021 and concluding in December 2022.
When negotiators met in Montreal to decide the details of their post-2020 agreement, the idea of halting and reversing biodiversity loss within a few years was already viewed as a steep challenge, Lockhart says:
“The important thing is that people spent a lot of time thinking about why we were setting certain kinds of targets…We wanted them to be specific, measurable and achieveable. What does achievable mean? What does ambitious mean? What message are we trying to send? This is politics; this isn’t necessarily science.
“If the answer is that it was never possible in the first place, then the question is: ‘Why did the world agree to it?’ And the answer to that is: ‘Because it matters that we try.’”
When Carbon Brief spoke to biologists about the feasibility of the goal in 2023, they expressed similar sentiments.
Dr David Obura, founding director of Coastal Oceans Research and Development, Indian Ocean (CORDIO) East Africa and current chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), told Carbon Brief in 2023:
“As a scientist, whether we can achieve halting and reversing by 2030, I’m highly doubtful.
“[But] for a political document like this, there has to be a time-bound [element]. So, in that sense, I think halt and reverse by 2030 is the right language to have, for sure.”
The future of COPs
But whether setting a lofty target truly spurred sufficient action on biodiversity loss remains an open question.
Following on from the agreement of the GBF in 2022, countries were asked to submit new national plans for how they will meet its goal. These are known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs).
In October 2024, Carbon Brief and the Guardian reported jointly that 85% of nations had missed the deadline for submitting their NBSAPs.
As of June 2025, only 26% of parties have submitted new NBSAPs. (Separately, 67% of parties have submitted shorter – and less detailed – national targets.)
Further Carbon Brief and Guardian reporting found that, of countries that have submitted nature plans, more than half do not commit to protecting 30% of their territories for nature by 2030, which was billed as one of the headline targets of the GBF.
And research published in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that countries that have submitted nature plans have broadly failed to commit to another GBF target to restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030.
Following on from a set of fractious UN environmental negotiations last year, some experts have called for “reforms” to the way that these summits – known as COPs – work.
Lockhart tells Carbon Brief that, following his time representing the UK at the highest level at COPs, he still carries hope for the future of these summits. But, he says, he also has questions about how the world views the role of these negotiations in addressing environmental problems:
“A question that everyone has to bear in mind is: ‘What [is the] value the [of] COPs?’
“You pour a huge amount of time and resource into a global dialogue, which results in a very, very carefully negotiated outcome. It’s extremely important, in my view, that you have a space where the whole world can come together in a room and agree that it wants to do something.
“The question is, where does the world locate that process?”
He said that he fears the “world is simultaneously asking too much and too little of COPs”, continuing:
“It’s asking too much in the sense that there’s so much coverage and intense scrutiny of ‘this person’s arrived’, ‘this comma has moved’…There’s an extraordinary media circus. [There is] extreme expectation on each individual meeting.
“And, at the same time, it’s simultaneously asking too little of them. It’s like: ‘Great, this word was in so it was a good COP’, or ‘this word was out so it was a bad COP’. And, of course, COPs are just one tiny part of this huge global process that needs to happen if we’re going to tackle these problems. I rather worry – and I know that colleagues feel the same – they’re just viewed as ends in themselves.”
COPs were “always” meant to be just one “part of the jigsaw puzzle”, he adds:
“We agree stuff. It doesn’t get delivered, by and large. It doesn’t get delivered because the implementation processes aren’t in place back at home in different government departments.
“The reasons that the implementation processes aren’t in place varies based on political factors, capability factors, jurisdictional factors, all sorts of different things. The problem is that by focussing on COPs as an end to themselves, we risk missing the wood for the trees.”
Lockhart is now working as the director of climate and energy at Apolitical, an online platform offering training and support for governments globally.
The post World might have set itself an unachievable nature target, says former UK negotiator appeared first on Carbon Brief.
World might have set itself an unachievable nature target, says former UK negotiator
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The planet is heating up more quickly than ever before.
For decades, greenhouse gas emissions caused by human activity have been building up in the atmosphere and trapping ever-higher levels of heat.
The resulting asymmetry between incoming solar energy and energy radiated back out into space – known as “Earth’s energy imbalance” – provides a direct measure of the extent to which humans are disrupting the Earth’s climate system.
This imbalance is growing and in 2025 its 10-year average reached a record high, indicating that global temperatures could increase at even higher rates in the future.
This is among the headline findings of the latest “indicators of global climate change” (IGCC) report, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, which tracks changes in the climate system on an annual basis.
The report, now in its fourth iteration, has been produced by dozens of scientists from around the world.
Its findings are designed to fill the gap between Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) science reports, which are published every 5-7 years.
In this article, we unpack the IGCC report, which explores how human activity is driving a growing energy imbalance and why monitoring systems to track global climate are so crucial.
(For more on previous IGCC reports, see Carbon Brief’s coverage in 2023, 2024 and 2025.)
Greenhouse gas emissions remain at an all-time high
Global greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to increase, mostly as a result of the use of fossil fuels. However, deforestation, agriculture and industrial processes also play an important role.
Over the most recent decade (2015-24), emissions stood at the equivalent of 54.6bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) per year. In 2024, the most recent year for which we have complete data, emissions reached 56.8GtCO2e.
As the chart below shows, these emissions have pushed up atmospheric levels of CO2, methane and nitrous oxide. In 2025, concentrations of these gases reached 425.6 parts per million (ppm), 1936.3 parts per billion (ppb) and 339.4ppb, respectively.
This represents a rise of 3.8%, 3.8% and 2.2%, respectively, since the 2019 levels reported in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report (AR6).
At the same time, declines in emissions of aerosols such as sulphur dioxide, partly as a result of efforts to tackle air pollution, are increasing the Earth’s energy imbalance. This is because aerosols have a cooling effect on the Earth’s climate, counteracting warming from CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.
(Tackling sulphur dioxide, alongside other particulate emissions, remains critical because the immediate health and environmental damage they cause far outweighs their short-term cooling effect on the climate.)
The Earth’s energy imbalance is rising rapidly
The Earth’s energy imbalance has long been recognised as a key indicator of how the climate is being affected by human activities.
However, it is only in the last few decades that scientists have been able to record temperature changes deep enough in the ocean to accurately quantify it.
Earth’s energy imbalance measures how quickly excess heat is accumulating in every part of the Earth system, primarily in the ocean, but also in land, ice and atmosphere.
Through this accumulation of heat, the energy imbalance influences the rate of sea level rise and ice melt across the world, as well as increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, such as storms, floods and droughts.
Without human influence, the Earth’s energy imbalance would be close to zero.
But, as greenhouse gas emissions have built up in the atmosphere, the imbalance has been growing since the 1970s. Recent increases to Earth’s energy imbalance have outpaced those projections made by climate models — indicating the planet could see more warming than expected in the future.
As the right-hand chart below shows, the imbalance is now at a record high, having more than doubled over the past two decades.
It has increased by around 40% since 2019, from an average 0.79 watts per square metre (Wm2) over 2006-18, according to IPCC AR6, to 1.12Wm2 over 2013-25.
The left-hand chart shows how heat is accumulating in the ocean (blues), ice (grey), land (orange) and atmosphere (purple).
Global temperature rise
The excess heat building up in the climate system from the energy imbalance is pushing up global temperatures at a record rate of 0.27C per decade.
We estimate that human-induced warming – the amount of observed global surface
temperature increase attributable to both the direct and indirect effects of human activities – reached 1.37C in 2025. This has risen from 1.0C in 2017, as reported in IPCC AR6.
While natural variability in the climate system – such as El Niño or La Niña events – can also influence temperatures year-to-year, the upward temperature trend we are seeing is being driven by the persistent imbalance in energy.
We now expect global temperatures to exceed the Paris Agreement limit of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels around the year 2030.
This is significant because 1.5C has been identified as the critical dividing line between manageable climate risks and catastrophic, potentially irreversible damage to global ecosystems and human societies.
Heat accumulating throughout the Earth system
While heat is accumulating throughout the Earth system, it is not being distributed evenly around the globe.
Since the 1970s, around 90% of this heat has been taken up by the ocean, affecting marine ecosystems, ocean circulation patterns, sea level rise and climate extremes.
For example, the number of marine heatwave days – periods of unusually high sea surface temperatures – has more than tripled globally since the early 1990s. The year 2025 alone saw 65 days of marine heatwaves – meaning they occurred, on average, more than one day a week.
Meanwhile, the cryosphere – the portion of the Earth made up of frozen water, including glaciers, ice sheets and permafrost – is experiencing widespread ice loss and thawing in response to the growing energy imbalance. This affects ecosystems, sea level rise and infrastructure in polar and high-latitude regions.
Rapid warming has also resulted in record extreme temperatures over land, with average maximum temperatures for any single day over 2016-25 around 1.92C above pre-industrial levels). This is an increase of almost half a degree compared to the previous decade (2006-15).
Sea level rise and the energy imbalance
Sea level rise provides one of the clearest long-term signals of a changing planet.
It is closely linked to Earth’s energy imbalance. As heat accumulates in the ocean, water expands, raising sea levels. Meanwhile, a warming land and atmosphere means addition of water to the oceans through melting of glaciers and ice sheets, also adding to sea level rise.
Over the long-term, sea levels have been rising, on average, at a rate of around 1.8mm per year since 1901, totalling a record 23cm in 2025. This is increasing the risk of coastal flooding, erosion and habitat loss in many low-lying areas around the world.
This rise can be seen in the left-hand chart below, which shows observed global sea level changes from tide gauges (grey and blue dashed lines) and satellites (red dashed lines) since 1901. The solid lines indicate the average across multiple datasets.
Sea level rise is accelerating consistent with the observed increase in Earth’s energy imbalance. Over 2006-25, sea levels have risen at a rate of 3.67mm per year – more than double the rate of 1.69mm per year seen over 1976-95.
This increasing rate is shown in the right-hand figure below, which shows four successive overlapping 20-year periods and the most-recent decade.
(Last year’s transition from El Niño to weak La Niña conditions affected global rainfall patterns and led to a small and temporary fall in global average sea level in 2025. This explains the slight decrease in rate of sea level rise for the most recent decade, which is affected more than the 20-year period 2006-25.)
The bigger picture
Despite greenhouse gas emissions not increasing as rapidly as in the 2000s, this year’s IGCC findings continue to show how far and how fast the climate is changing due to human activity.
A significant increase in decarbonisation efforts in the second half of this decade is required to slow down the rate of human-caused warming and limit the escalation of climate risks and impacts.
These findings, like many others produced by scientists across the globe, rely on international expertise, partnership and the maintenance and availability of global climate datasets and the global observing programmes that underpin them.
This year’s edition of IGCC used more than 40 global datasets produced by research teams around the world, including the NASA satellite record of the Earth’s energy imbalance and the ARGO deep ocean float network.
However, a number of long-term monitoring programmes could be threatened by funding decisions made by governments around the world, most notably the Trump administration in the US.
Local meteorological data and weather balloon measurement programmes in many countries have declined in recent years, especially in Africa, the west Pacific and South America. This reduces scientists’ ability to monitor and understand key indicators of climate change.
This is not just an issue for climate science. Many of these observations are key to weather forecasts and systems that provide early warning for extreme weather. For example, media reports have suggested that recent reductions in weather balloon measurements in Alaska led to a lack of warnings for a recent winter storm.
The continuity and integrity of the climate observations that scientists use to understand how the climate is changing depends on effective and sustained coordination by international organisations, such as the Global Climate Observing System, the World Meteorological Organization and World Climate Research Programme.
Without this data and its coordination, future assessments will be much more difficult at a time when urgent climate action is needed.
The post Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Guest post: How a record-high ‘energy imbalance’ is driving global warming
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