What is Cop15? Haven’t we just had one?

Cop15 is about biodiversity, not the climate, although there are crossovers. It will be the 15th conference of the parties to the UN convention on biological diversity – hence Cop15. The world negotiates these targets only once a decade: the Aichi biodiversity targets were the last agreed, at Cop10 in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010. Governments pledged then to halve the loss of natural habitats and expand nature reserves to 17% of the world’s land area by 2020, among other targets. They failed on every count.