The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is urging world leaders to secure an ambitious global agreement to save life support systems at the COP15 UN biodiversity conference, which is taking place in Montreal from December 7 to December 19.

According to WWF, with one million species now threatened with extinction, nature is declining at rates unprecedented in human history, and people are becoming more aware of the crisis.

Despite world leaders' pledges to secure an ambitious global biodiversity agreement, key issues, such as how to raise the necessary funds, remain unresolved.

The current biodiversity financing gap is estimated to be $700 billion per year. WWF is urging countries to significantly increase finance, including international public finance with developing countries as beneficiaries, and to align public and private financial flows with nature-friendly practices, such as the elimination or repurposing of harmful subsidies and other incentives.

The talks are the culmination of four years of intense negotiations, with the pandemic delaying any agreement on the global biodiversity framework under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) until now.

According to a recent WWF study, the number of people concerned about rapid nature loss in the world's top global biodiversity hotspots has risen to nearly 60%, representing a 10% increase since 2018. Nature and climate change were rated as the most important policy issues by 81% of those polled.

The WWF says it will press governments in Montreal to adopt a "Paris"-style agreement capable of driving immediate action to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 in order to achieve a nature-positive world.

“Climate change is not the only horseman of the environmental apocalypse. Nature loss looms just as large. And the two are intertwined. You can’t solve one without addressing the other. But nature is often overshadowed by climate change in public policy debates,” said Carter Roberts, President, and CEO of WWF-US.

"Many people believe that COP15 can be used to highlight the critical role that nature plays in ensuring a sustainable future. And it is an opportunity for governments, businesses, and other actors to make bold new commitments to be nature positive by 2030, as well as to transform how the world produces and consumes food and other products."

Over 90 world leaders have signed the Leaders' Pledge for Nature, pledging to halt biodiversity loss by 2030.

“We are losing biodiversity at an alarming rate. We’ve lost half of the world’s warm water corals, and forests the size of roughly one football field vanish every two seconds. Wildlife populations have suffered a two-thirds decline globally in less than 50 years. The future of the natural world is on a knife’s edge. But nature is resilient – and with a strong global agreement driving urgent action it can bounce back,” says Marco Lambertini, Director General, WWF International.

According to scientists, nature holds the answers to many of the world's most pressing challenges, and failure at COP15 is not an option because it would increase the world's risk of pandemics, exacerbate climate change, making it impossible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and stunt economic growth, making the poorest people more vulnerable to food and water insecurity.

To address the nature crisis, WWF states that governments must agree on a nature-positive goal that unites the world in protecting more of the remaining nature on the planet, restoring as much as possible, and transforming productive sectors to work with nature rather than against it.

It describes Montreal as a time when leaders must deliver for people and the planet.

The WWF also emphasizes the importance of countries agreeing to a goal of conserving at least 30% of the planet's land, inland waters, and oceans by 2030 through a rights-based approach that recognizes indigenous peoples' and local communities' leadership and rights.

At the same time, it emphasizes the need for action to ensure that the remaining 70% of the planet is sustainably managed and restored in order to address the drivers of biodiversity loss with the same level of urgency.

WWF believes that a commitment to reduce the global footprint of production and consumption by half by 2030, while acknowledging huge inequalities between and within countries, is critical in the framework to ensure that key sectors such as agriculture and food, fisheries, forestry, extractives, and infrastructure are transformed to help deliver a nature-positive world.

A strong implementation mechanism that requires countries to review progress against targets and increase action as needed is an essential mechanism for ensuring real action is delivered on the ground, according to WWF.

According to WWF research, 56% of people surveyed believe that government action to protect biodiversity is insufficient.

The study, which polled over 9200 people in regions with alarming rates of biodiversity loss, discovered that people perceived policy-related actions to be more impactful than individual consumer action.