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From “The New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

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Today, the story behind the ambitious new global agreement to protect the planet that you probably haven’t heard of.

My colleague, Catrin Einhorn, explains.

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It’s Friday, January 6.

Catrin, as 2022 came to a close, something really big happened in your corner of the world that I think escaped the attention of the rest of us.

Even though it’s not really just my corner.

It’s not your corner of the world.

If you think, it’s all nature.

It’s all corners of the world.

But yes.

Something quite historic, actually. So tell us about this thing.

So listeners are probably familiar with the Paris Agreement, this big global agreement to limit climate change.

Right. The world locking hands, dozens of countries, and saying, we are going to do something about carbon emissions.

Right. So similarly, countries of the world came together just now in December in Montreal and said, we’re going to tackle this big other crisis, biodiversity loss.

In an agreement of the same scale.

Arguably similar. Lots of people there really talked about it as a Paris moment for biodiversity, biodiversity losses, this crisis that has been really overshadowed by climate change. And people are really trying to wake the world up.

So tell us about this biodiversity crisis that merited such a historic global accord. And I guess, on a more basic level, tell us about the very meaning of biodiversity.

What is biodiversity?

Right.

Yeah.

And why did the world decide to get together and address it?

Well, biodiversity is the variety of life on the planet. So that includes species and also ecosystems. And the biodiversity loss that’s happening right now around the world is unprecedented in human history. Of course, there have been extinction events in the past that are worse. But the last one of those was 65 million years ago with the dinosaurs.

Right.

So in terms of how long we’ve been around on the planet, this is worse than it’s ever been. The global rate of species extinction is at least tens to hundreds of times higher been the average over the past 10 million years.

Say that one more time.

The global rate of species extinction —

Right now.

— is at least tens to hundreds of times higher than it has averaged over the past 10 million years.

Wow. So this is a uniquely bad moment for extinction and biodiversity loss.

Since humans have been around. And you can think of ecosystems as like a Jenga tower. And in fact, at the global biodiversity talks in Montreal, there was a sculpture of a Jenga tower to make this point. You can take out pieces. And for a while, it remains standing. But scientists don’t really understand which combination of blocks that get removed from that tower are going to totally destabilize it and make it collapse. What we do know is that the more we remove, the more unstable the tower becomes, yeah.

Give us some real-world examples of this to grapple with.

I think we’re all really familiar with endangered animals. So we grew up learning about tigers and pandas. And PS, those species are doing really well. Tigers and pandas, conservation actually works when you do it and you give it the resources it needs.

But if you look at biodiversity writ large, species are going in the opposite direction. They’re plummeting. Insects have been called the little things that run the world. They’re at the base of the food chain. They’re supporting everything above them. And insects are in real trouble. Take the American burying beetle, for example. Have you heard of it.

I have not. [MUSIC PLAYING]

So it’s actually a big beetle as beetles go. It’s black with these red splotches. And what these beetles do is they search out dead birds and mammals of a certain size. Can’t be too big. Can’t be too small. Rodent, squirrels, passenger pigeons, when they were around.

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And a male and a female work together to bury this dead animal in the ground. They then make these secretions. They wrap it in all these secretions. And then, the female lays the eggs on or near the dead animal.

Amazing.

And when the eggs hatch, they feed on the dead animal. But the important thing that they do for us is that all that dead animal stuff makes the soil really rich. And so they’re actually improving the soil.

So these beetles aren’t just amazing in their secretions, and wrappings, and earth fertilizing. They’re doing something quite important for the soil and, therefore, for you and I.

Exactly. Right. [MUSIC PLAYING]

And these beetles used to be widespread across the Eastern 1/2 of the United States. And they basically just collapsed throughout the last 100 years or so.

So what’s the next example to think about?

The classic example is pollinators.

By which we mean?

Bees, and butterflies, and bats. So 75 percent of the world’s crops benefit from animal pollination. I do think it’s important to say that a lot of our cereal crops, so wheat, and corn, and rice, those are wind-pollinated. So it’s not like they pollinate everything.

Right.

But they pollinate one out of three bites that every American eats, according to the USDA.

It’s a fascinating statistic.

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And what is happening to our pollinators?

They’re doing really badly. One study showed that the relative abundance of five bumblebee species has declined by 96 percent.

A huge fall.

Yeah. [MUSIC PLAYING]

And so one thing that farmers have done is they’ve replaced these wild pollinators, say bumblebees, for example, with domesticated bees, honeybees. I don’t know if listeners know, but honeybees aren’t native to the United States. They’re domesticated. They’re trucked around from crop-to-crop. And farmers pay for beekeepers to bring these honey bees to pollinate almonds, and apples, and —

Right. Like paid consultants to the crop.

Not consultants. They’re actually like —

Like contract workers.

Yeah, but even honeybees, these domesticated bees, are collapsing. And beekeepers are reporting really large losses. And it’s something that they’re really struggling with.

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So what exactly is causing all this loss of biodiversity across the world? What is behind all these species being in this much trouble?

The big inter-governmental scientific panel on biodiversity loss, the leading global authority, has ranked the causes, the drivers, in order.

Oh, wow.

Would you like to guess?

Would I like to guess? I would.

What’s the top cause for biodiversity loss, number one in the world?

Just based on my news judgments, I’d have to guess it would be climate change.

Nope.

No?

Human destruction.

Yeah.

Consumption.

Change in land and sea use is the way they put it. But yeah, it’s basically humans taking over ecosystems for our own purposes, agriculture, towns and communities, mining. We take over land. And we take over the sea. That’s the first cause. Do you want to guess on number two?

I don’t want to guess anymore now.

They call it direct exploitation of organisms, which is hunting, and fishing, and us actually killing these animals for our own use, animals and plants. Number three is climate change.

Interesting.

And that, in the coming decades, is predicted to be the number one. If climate change goes unchecked, it will emerge as the major, major driving factor. It’s already a factor. And it’s only going to get worse.

Well, let’s focus for a moment on number three because I think one and two are somewhat intuitive. Humans either move into a place and make it hard for a species to exist or they hunt it, make it endangered. When it comes to climate change, how exactly does their relationship work? Is climate change a cause and effect relationship?

It can be. They’re so interlinked. Biodiversity loss and climate change are so interlinked. So take coral reefs, for example. When waters become too hot, the corals expel the algae that they need to survive. And the corals will bleach and eventually die. So animals and plants have certain temperatures and climatic conditions that they’ve evolved over tens or hundreds of thousands of millions of years to live in.

And if those change, then we’ll see how that goes for them. Scientists are racing to try and understand how this is all going to play out. Of course, all of these things build on each other, unfortunately. So for example, for animals to adapt to climate change, they need to be able to move to new places, like move up in altitude or move toward the poles, where it’s going to be colder. However, because of all that land destruction that we talked about before, they can’t get around. They’re hemmed in. And climate change is going to wreak a much worse toll.

Right. So in terms of these two big crises that we now face, I wonder if there’s an easy way to answer this. But which is the bigger, more urgent problem, climate change, which we’ve come to think of as the greatest challenge of our time, or this loss of biodiversity, which is now getting more attention akin to climate change?

Some scientists are increasingly arguing that they’re comparable existential threats. I put this question to Katharine Hayhoe, who’s this prominent climate scientist. And she had a really interesting answer. She said, climate change presents a near-term threat to the future of human civilization. The biodiversity crisis presents a longer term threat to the viability of the human species.

Translate that for us.

Basically, in a shorter term, climate change is a huge threat to order in the world and governments being able to function with all the chaos that climate change could wreak.

Right.

But she’s saying that the biodiversity crisis, it’s a longer term thing. But she actually is saying that it presents a greater threat to the viability of the human species. In other words, our continued existence.

So one, climate, threatens how we organize ourselves. The other, biodiversity, threatens our very future, our very existence.

Because we can’t live without it. We can’t live without nature.

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And with that framing in mind, it seems like, over time, the loss of biodiversity is potentially a greater threat to us than climate change.

Especially given that we’re starting to address climate change. So the curve that we’re on with climate change is improving. Biodiversity loss is not being addressed in the same way. And that is why, in Montreal last month, all these countries came together, nearly every country in the world, to make this new global agreement.

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We’ll be right back.

So tell us more about this global biodiversity agreement that was just reached by all these countries and how it is supposed to confront the problem.

So it’s 23 targets. There’s a really splashy one. The most well-known one is called 30 by 30. And countries basically agreed to protect 30 percent land and 30 percent oceans by 2030. It was a really —

That is a sexy number.

It’s really historic. It’s conservation at a scale that has never been attempted before.

Right. So how does that work in practice? And what might it look like, protecting 30 percent of the world’s land and water?

So country-by-country, countries will identify places that they want to protect. And that can mean a variety of things. But what it basically is going to mean is they’re going to restrict certain activities that are going to damage biodiversity. So they could restrict, say, logging. They could restrict fishing. They could restrict agriculture. And that doesn’t mean that people can’t do anything on those lands. But they should be used in a very sustainable way.

Let’s get a little specific. What does this agreement imagine would be an example of a piece of land or a portion of the sea that would become protected?

A national park is the obvious example. So a national park can count. And already, there’s 17 percent of the land already across the planet is considered to be protected.

That’s interesting.

Yeah, so a national park is an example. However, there’s other examples like the Mayan Biosphere Reserve, which is a territory of two million hectares in Guatemala. And local communities have managed that area for 30 years. So there’s sustainable logging, other sustainable use. It’s not like a park where people get kicked out and they can’t live there. That is not the idea of 30 by 30, specifically. Rather, it’s about protecting land in ways that people can use it sustainably.

Right. So there’s a practicality to this, which is like, it’s not like 30 percent of the world will suddenly be rid of humans and industry, but instead will be managed in a more biodiversity-friendly way.

Yeah, so there would be restrictions on logging, restrictions on agriculture, restrictions on the most damaging activities, fishing, so that it could be used in a more sustainable way. Exactly.

What is the role of the United States in this agreement?

We’re not in it.

We’re not in it?

No.

Why not?

We’re one of two UN countries that aren’t in it. The other one is the Vatican, the Holy See.

[CHUCKLES]: Right. Why isn’t the United States in it?

There’s just not the support among Republicans in the Senate is the short answer. But the US did send its biodiversity envoy to Montreal. She was there negotiating. And the Biden administration has — when he first took office, he did an executive order, which is called America the Beautiful, which is essentially an American 30 by 30. So certainly, if the US was a full member, was a member of this treaty, it would be able to play a much more influential role in places like Montreal when the stuff is being negotiated. But they did the best they could.

So the US is saying that, we’re with you even if we’re not signatories of this.

That’s right. And they’re kicking in money. And so they definitely are players in this. And money is the issue. It was the most divisive issue in Montreal. For a minute there, it looked like it might derail everything.

And why is money so important?

Well, the stuff costs a lot, first of all. Some estimates are $700 billion a year to do all these things that have to be done, reforming these industries. It’s a lot. And then on top of that, there’s this dynamic which is like — you see the same thing with climate change.

And it’s this idea that wealthier countries were able to use their natural resources in order to get where they are today. But now that countries in the global South want to do the same thing, wealthy countries are saying, oh, no, no, no, you can’t. For the good of us all, we have to leave the fossil fuels in the ground. And we have to leave our biodiversity intact.

Right.

And when you add colonialism on top of that, these countries literally, in some cases, exploited the resources of other countries. And now they’re saying, you can’t exploit your own resources.

Right. You have to preserve them.

Countries are — you have to preserve them for all of us. Countries are like, OK, then pay us.

Got it. So an element of this agreement is that countries that are less industrialized are looking to more industrialized countries like the US and saying, we need you to subsidize us not using our natural resources in a way that might preserve biodiversity.

That’s underlying it. I don’t think — it’s really spoken about more like, we need help to do these things.

Got it.

But the undercurrent is like that. So this Nigerian biologist that I met there named Joseph Onoja, he said, they came around and plundered our resources to develop themselves. And he’s like, I’m a conservation biologist. I want us to preserve nature. But he’s like, it makes us really mad when, then, we’re told that we can’t do the very thing that you did to our country.

So as we learned when it came to the Global Climate Accords, countries like to make pledges. And then, they never deliver. For example, the US somewhat notoriously has not contributed its part towards the cost of the Global Climate Accord. So is there any reason to think that we are going to be contributing a lot of money towards this Global Biodiversity Accord?

Some of the money is already — it’s tied up in USAID and things. And that is there. The bigger question is, is this agreement going to work at all? Are these targets going to be met at all? They’re so ambitious.

Well, that was my next question. [LAUGHS]

Sorry. Sorry.

No, let’s go there. The inevitable question when we’re talking about a follow-up to a global climate accord is, didn’t we see that movie already? And we realized that we’re better at promising things than delivering it, the whole world.

That’s really the question. Previous attempts at this, kind of, thing have failed miserably. And these targets are super ambitious. It would require reforming agriculture, and forestry, and fishing in major ways because they really do tackle these causes of biodiversity loss. But to change that is transformational change.

Right.

And we’re trying to do that in eight years?

Right.

Seven. It’s 2023. And really, it’s not legally binding. So really, what’s in it for countries is that they’re just going to be named and shamed if they’re not keeping to their targets.

Got it. So let’s talk about what happens if these lofty goals don’t get met. What does it look like?

These goals are so lofty. They’re actually setting out to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. That seems impossible, just given reality. But the goals are set high like that because the idea is to get countries as close as they can. And so there’s obviously many different ways that it turns out. And how people are bending the curve on biodiversity loss is the answer to that question. There’s not one — it’s not like there’s two outcomes, a succeed and a fail. I think it’s —

There’s a potential middle ground.

All, kinds of, middle grounds.

Well, let’s talk about what happens if, perhaps, we don’t fail and we don’t massively succeed, but we’re in this middle ground when it comes to biodiversity. It feels like that then means we have to do something similar to what we do when it comes to climate change, which is we have to adapt. We have to live in a world where both climate change and biodiversity loss are a fact of life. So I want to turn to the question of what adaptation looks like when it comes to biodiversity. Are there good examples of that happening or potential future examples of that happening?

Well, we talked about the honeybees earlier.

The contract honeybee workers.

Exactly. And another thing that we’ve done just in terms of how to survive with this growing population that we have is the intensification of agriculture, which is driving biodiversity loss has also sustained us. So it’s this difficult double-edged sword. We’re able to produce more food per —

With less biodiversity.

Then — because we do things like we pull nitrogen from the air with fossil fuels to put it on fields. And we’ve done this engineering of seeds and crops to make them have these incredible yields.

Right.

But in doing all that homogenization, it’s a huge risk because god forbid some disease comes along or there are climatic conditions that change and you need something more drought-resistant. This invaluable genetic diversity is like our safety net. And so even as we intensify things, we’re fraying our safety net that we have. God forbid something goes wrong.

I want to make sure I understand that because it’s important and fascinating. You’re saying, in a world where we have a lot of biodiversity, we have a lot of sources of food and, therefore, a lower risk that any one thing can wipe it all out. But in responding to less biodiversity, we have come up with solutions like genetically engineered grain that lots of us rely on that could more easily be wiped out. So in some ways, we’re at greater risk in a world with less biodiversity.

Yeah, it’s the world that we’re creating in order to sustain eight billion people on the planet, living with the consumption levels that we live at. But it’s a huge risk. We can innovate our way out of all these problems until we can’t.

Right. And human adaptation, as creative as it may be, you’re really saying, is always going to be inadequate.

To some degree.

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There’s another question here. We’ve spent a lot of this conversation — and in general, when biodiversity loss is discussed, it’s about provision of food and water for people and even just the joy that people get out of nature. But there’s —

We make it about us.

We make it about us. Exactly. There are millions of species on this planet. And at the core of this, at the heart of this whole debate about biodiversity loss, is how much of the planet are we really entitled to?

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Well, Catrin, thank you very much.

Thank you so much. [MUSIC PLAYING]

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today.

In a third day of humiliating defeats, Republican House Leader Kevin McCarthy lost his 11th effort to become Speaker, despite making major concessions to his biggest skeptics.

By Thursday morning, McCarthy had promised his right wing critics a series of compromises that would significantly weaken his power as Speaker, including a rule that would allow a single lawmaker to force a vote to remove McCarthy from the job. But even that proved insufficient. McCarthy still fell as many as 18 votes short of what he needed, leaving the house without a leader or the ability to function.

And on Thursday afternoon, South Carolina’s Supreme Court ruled that the state’s constitution protects the right to an abortion, a ruling that overturns the state’s law banning abortion after roughly six weeks of pregnancy. The ruling is a major victory for abortion rights in the American South, where the end of Roe versus Wade has severely restricted access to the procedure.

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Today’s episode was produced by Michael Simon Johnson, Nina Feldman, Mary Wilson, and Rob Szypko. It was edited by Lexie Diao and M.J. Davis Lin, contains original music by Marion Lozano and Dan Powell, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

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That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.