Canada’s Western Hudson Bay polar bear population has fallen 27% in just five years, according to a government report released this week, suggesting climate change is affecting the animals.

Every autumn, the bears living along the western edge of the Bay pass through the sub-Arctic tourist town of Churchill, Manitoba, as they return to the sea ice. This has made the population not only the best-studied group in the world, but also the most famous, with the local bear-viewing economy valued at $5.30 million annually.

However, Nunavut’s government assessment finds that just 618 bears remained in 2021 — a roughly 50% drop from the 1980s.

“In some ways, it’s totally shocking,” said John Whiteman, chief research scientist at conservation nonprofit Polar Bears International. “What’s really sobering is that these kinds of declines are the kind that unless sea ice loss is halted, are predicted to eventually cause … extinction.”

Polar bears depend on the sea ice to hunt, staking out over seal breathing holes. But the Arctic is now warming about four times faster than the rest of the world. Around Hudson Bay, seasonal sea ice is melting out earlier in the spring, and forming later in the fall, forcing bears to go for longer without food.

Scientists cautioned that a direct link between the population decline and sea ice loss in Hudson Bay wasn’t yet clear, as four of the past five years have seen moderately good ice conditions. Instead, they said, climate-caused changes in the local seal population might be driving bear numbers down.

And while it’s possible some bears may have moved, “the number of adult male bears has remained more or less the same. What’s driven the decline is a reduced number of juvenile bears and adult females,” said Stephen Atkinson, an independent wildlife biologist who led the research on behalf of the government.

This change in demographics doesn’t fit with the idea that bears are moving out of western Hudson Bay, he added.

“There was a very low number of cubs being produced in 2021,” said Andrew Derocher, who leads the Polar Bear Science Lab at the University of Alberta. “We’re looking at a slowly aging population, and when you do get bad [ice] years, older bears are much more vulnerable to increased mortality.”

Also of concern to scientists, the report suggests declines have sped up. Between 2011 and 2016, the population dropped only 11%.

There are 19 populations of polar bears spread out among Russia, Alaska, Norway, Greenland and Canada. But Western Hudson Bay is among the southernmost locales, and scientists project the bears here are likely to be among the first to disappear.

A 2021 study in the journal Nature Climate Change found most of the world’s polar bear populations are on track to collapse by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions aren’t heavily curbed.
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City officials and outreach workers across the United States were rushing to get people off the streets this week, turning sites such as libraries and arenas into shelters to mitigate a humanitarian crisis caused by freezing weather and an influx of migrants.

Chicago’s Department of Family and Support Services opened libraries and police stations as warming stations, while shelters in cities as far south as Baton Rouge, Louisiana, expanded hours and bed capacity as temperatures were expected to sink to the teens in Fahrenheit (below -10 degrees Celsius) Friday night.

Officials in Denver, Colorado, where the temperature of minus 24 degrees Fahrenheit (-31 degrees Celsius) Thursday became the second coldest in the city’s history, opened the Coliseum as a shelter this week. Officials prepared the indoor arena to house 225 people but increased its capacity to 359 Wednesday night.

“I feel good about being here because I don’t have to worry about sleeping out in the cold, I don’t have to worry about going from place to place,” said Laphonse McMillan, one of the people seeking shelter at the Coliseum this week.

Denver officials also opened the municipal Wellington Webb Building on Thursday night. The building is a workplace for more than 1,000 city employees and, according to the city’s emergency operations center, it is the first time it has been used as a shelter.

Cities across the United States have been struggling to address homelessness. A U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development report this week showed nearly 600,000 people were homeless as of January 2022. The report found that homelessness among people in shelters declined by 1.6%, while unsheltered homelessness increased by 3.4%, compared to 2020.

“Severe weather exacerbates the cruel reality of homelessness in America,” said Donald Whitehead, executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Compounding factors

In Hennepin County, Minnesota, where the National Weather Service said blizzard conditions and extreme cold through Saturday could be “life-threatening,” the director of housing stability, David Hewitt, said shelters or facilities such as hotel rooms were accommodating 242 families, compared to a typical capacity of 119 families.

Hewitt said there has been a surge in county shelter stays since a COVID-era eviction moratorium and federal emergency rental assistance programs ended in June.

“We literally have 300 more children in shelter today than we did this time last year,” he said.

Thousands of people trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border daily have placed additional strain on cities in their path. Nearly 1,000 migrants were staying in Denver city shelters or partner shelters as of Thursday, according to a city statement.

In the Texas border city of El Paso, where temperatures were in the teens Fahrenheit Friday morning, shelters were also feeling the combined strain of mass migration and a weather-induced need for housing.

“We have cold temperatures in conjunction with a large number of refugees,” John Martin, head of the Opportunity Center for the Homeless in El Paso, told CBS News, adding that local shelters expected a 50% to 60% uptick in need this week. “It just seems like everything’s hitting at once.”

Making room 

Meanwhile, a blizzard was moving eastward across the Great Lakes region Friday.

Central Iowa Shelter in Des Moines, where blizzard conditions were expected through Saturday, housed 250 people overnight in its 150-person capacity shelter this week, and would not turn anyone away, said director of marketing and business development Melissa Alto-Kintigh. Volunteers were still going into the community and urging people to seek shelter from the bitter cold.

“There’s enough space, although this does mean that some people sleep on the floors,” she said.
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The highly contagious omicron subvariant XBB has surged to more than 50% of COVID-19 cases in the northeastern United States and risks spreading fast as millions of Americans began holiday travel on Friday.  

It’s estimated that at week’s end, XBB will account for 18.3% of the COVID-19 cases in the United States, up from 11.2% in the previous week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.  

The subvariant is currently dominant in the Northeast, but it accounts for less than 10% of infections in many other parts of the country, the CDC said. 

Andrew Pekosz, a virologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, said holiday travel in the United States could speed up the XBB subvariant’s spread across the country.  

The American Automobile Association had estimated that 112.7 million people planned to travel 50 miles (80 km) or more from home between Friday and January 2, up 3.6 million travelers over last year and closing in on pre-pandemic numbers.  

But that number was likely to be diminished by the treacherous weather complicating air and road travel going into the weekend. 

“Anytime a new variant moves to a different geographic area, it does run the risk of sort of spawning a mini-outbreak in that area,” Pekosz said.  

Still, Pekosz said he did not see the XBB subvariant driving the kind of massive surges seen last winter from the original omicron variant. 

Top U.S. infectious-disease expert Anthony Fauci said in November that updated COVID-19 booster shots – which target the original variant of the coronavirus as well as BA.4 and BA.5 subvariants – would still provide “some protection, but not the optimal protection” against the XBB variant.  

XBB is a subvariant of the BA.2 variant.  

The earliest BA.5 lineage now represents just a small fraction of cases, having been overtaken by its offshoots, BQ.1 and BQ.1.1, which still remain the dominant variants in the United States, though they are on the decline.  

The rise in cases of the new variant comes a week after the White House COVID response coordinator urged Americans to get their flu vaccines and updated COVID-19 boosters, pointing to rising cases in about 90% of the country ahead of the year-end holidays. 

The XBB variant has been driving up cases in parts of Asia, including Singapore. While some experts have said it is more transmissible, it has not resulted in a surge in hospitalizations. 

BQ.1.1 and BQ.1 are expected to account for 63.1% of cases in the United States, compared with 64.6% a week ago, the CDC said.
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One of the world’s largest marine citizen science projects has surveyed its 500th section of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef since the effort began in 2020. This year’s Great Reef Census, which runs from September to December, has revealed severe damage to the coral, while other parts of the 2,300-kilometer World Heritage site are thriving. The Great Barrier Reef is made up of about 3,000 individual reefs, making it the world’s largest coral system.

The annual reconnaissance of the Great Barrier Reef off northeastern Australia has produced tens of thousands of images.

They have been taken by divers and snorkelers onboard more than 60 dive boats, tourism vessels, sailing boats, super-yachts and tugboats, who are surveying the far reaches of the world’s largest coral system.

They have visited 500 individual reefs during the past three years. The photographs paint a picture of the health of the world’s largest coral system, providing data on the types of coral and their coverage at each reef.

“Reaching 500 reefs through the Great Reef Census is a massive achievement for the community,” said Andy Ridley, chief executive officer of Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, which organizes the survey. “It just goes to prove how a motley flotilla of all sorts of vessels can reach such an enormous amount of area bearing in mind the Great Barrier Reef is the same size of Germany. We have reached about 15% of the reefs, which is amazing.”

Early results from the survey have shown some parts of the Great Barrier Reef are flourishing. Others, though, have been damaged by warmer ocean temperatures and more intense tropical storms caused by climate change as well as coral-eating crown of thorns starfish.

There are other threats, too, including overfishing, pollution and the industrialization of the Queensland coast.

Starting in March, citizen-scientists from across the world will be able to join the project by helping to analyze the images from the expeditions.

The Great Reef Census is a partnership with the University of Queensland, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, which administers the region, James Cook University, the Australian Institute of Marine Science and several technology companies.

The surveillance project on what is arguably Australia’s greatest natural treasure has become so big that artificial intelligence is being used to scan much of the data, but Ridley has stressed that citizen-scientists, or virtual volunteers, have a critical part to play.

The Great Barrier Reef is so vast that it is the only living thing visible from space.
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Russia’s space agency said it is considering a plan to send an empty spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) to bring home three crew members ahead of schedule, after their Soyuz capsule sprang a coolant leak while docked to the orbiting outpost.

Roscosmos and NASA officials said at a news conference Thursday they continue to investigate how the coolant line of the capsule’s external radiator sustained a tiny puncture last week, just as two cosmonauts were preparing for a routine spacewalk.

No final decision has been made about the precise means of flying the capsule’s three crew members back to Earth, whether by launching another Soyuz to retrieve them or by the seemingly less likely option of sending them home in the leaky capsule without most of its coolant.

Last week, Sergei Krikalev, Russia’s chief of crewed space programs, said the leak could have been caused by a micrometeoroid strike. But he and his NASA counterparts have left open the possibility of other culprits, such as a hardware failure or an impact by a tiny piece of space debris.

The Dec. 14 leak prompted mission controllers in Moscow to call off the spacewalk as a live NASA webcast showed what appeared to be a flurry of snowflake-like particles spewing from the rear of the Soyuz spacecraft.

The leak lasted for hours and emptied the radiator of coolant used to regulate temperatures inside the crew compartment of the spacecraft.

NASA has said that none of the ISS crew was ever in any danger from the leak.

Cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dimitri Petelin, who were suited up for the spacewalk at the time, flew to the ISS aboard the now-crippled Soyuz MS-22 capsule along with U.S. astronaut Frank Rubio in September.

They were originally scheduled to fly back on the same spacecraft in March, but Krikalev and NASA’s ISS program manager, Joel Montalbano, said Roscosmos would return them to Earth two or three weeks early if Russian space officials decide to launch an empty crew capsule for their retrieval.

Four other ISS crew members — two more from NASA, a third Russian cosmonaut and a Japanese astronaut — rode to the ISS in October via a NASA-contracted SpaceX Crew Dragon and they also remain aboard, with their capsule parked at the station.

The leak has upended Russia’s ISS routines for the weeks ahead, forcing a suspension of all future Roscosmos spacewalks as officials in Moscow shift their focus to the leaky MS-22, a designated lifeboat for its three crew members if something goes wrong aboard the space station.

Two U.S. astronauts, Rubio and Josh Cassada, conducted a seven-hour spacewalk without incident on Thursday to install a new roll-out solar array outside the station, NASA said.

If MS-22 is deemed unsafe to carry crew members back to Earth, another Soyuz capsule in line to ferry Russia’s next crew to the station in March would instead “be sent up unmanned to have (a) healthy vehicle on board the station to be able to rescue crew,” Krikalev, Roscosmos’ executive director for human spaceflight, told reporters.

No mention was made of possibly sending a spare SpaceX Dragon for crew retrieval.

Pinpointing the cause of the leak could factor into decisions about the best way to return crew members.

The recent Geminid meteor shower initially seemed to raise the odds of a micrometeoroid strike as the origin, but the leak was facing the wrong way for that to be the case, Montalbano said, though a space rock could have come from another direction.

Sending the stricken MS-22 back to Earth unfixed with humans aboard appeared an unlikely choice given the vital role the coolant system plays to prevent overheating of the capsule’s crew compartment, which Montalbano and Krikalev said was currently being vented with air flow allowed through an open hatch to the ISS.
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A former judge of the Supreme People’s Court, the highest court in China, is calling for the suspension or revocation of cases against some 80 people found guilty of violating “zero-COVID” policy regulations since the advent of omicron, a less deadly variant that began spreading in December 2021.

China implemented the zero-COVID policy in January 2020, the month after the virus was first detected in humans in Wuhan. Anyone convicted of obstructing the prevention and control of COVID-19 faced a prison sentence of three to seven years, according to regulations set forth by the National Health and Medical Commission of China on January 20, 2020.

Offenses included leaving home during lockdown

The offenses included violations such as leaving home during a lockdown without official authorization and concealing travel plans. Both made it difficult for authorities to trace contacts and contain the virus. Other offenses included avoiding quarantine, concealing close contact history and refusing to perform duties related to COVID containment.

Huang Yingsheng, the former judge, posted on December 10 on the Chinese blogging platform Baidu Baijiahao that because Beijing has relaxed its zero-COVID policy, it is no longer appropriate to prosecute, convict and punish people for violating containment regulations. He posted on the topic again on Monday.

In an interview published Tuesday in the Economic Observer Network, a weekly government-run newspaper, Huang emphasized that since COVID mutated into the less deadly omicron strain in November 2021, “cases where people have been criminally or administratively punished for spreading the virus should also be corrected.”

In cases that originated after the advent of omicron but that are still in progress, Huang said, the trial should be terminated, the accused acquitted, and the case withdrawn without further prosecution. For cases in which a sentence has been imposed, the verdict should be overturned and those who are imprisoned should be freed. And, like those whose sentence was a period of probation, their record should be cleared.

Wang Quanzhang, a Chinese human rights lawyer, said that the Law on the Prevention and Control of Infectious Diseases fails to specify exactly what is illegal.

“The law is defined by specific law enforcement officers and judiciary,” Wang told VOA Mandarin. “The scope of attack is very large. Even if someone’s travel code has an error, or he fails to report his travel history truthfully, he may be arrested and charged for this crime.”

Cases still under investigation

Cai Fan, a retired associate professor of law at Wenzhou City University in Zhejiang, suggested that it would be difficult for authorities to adopt Huang’s recommendations, saying, “After three years of COVID prevention, some people have been detained and sentenced. If you delete all the cases of these people, then the country will have to pay compensation. How can that be possible?”

Zero-COVID criminal cases in Sichuan, Hunan and Shanxi provinces and elsewhere are still under investigation. At least three infected people in Hunan were being investigated for not reporting their infections to the community, not wearing masks when they entered and exited multiple public places, or for infecting other people, according to a local news network run by the government.

Wang, the human rights lawyer, believes it may be difficult to change the course of prosecution.

“Excessive reliance on the law makes it difficult to correct unjust, false and wrongly decided cases even if new situations arise,” he said. “But [the] mechanism is top-down. New regulations need to be issued and a systematic correction needs to be adopted. By then, some innocent people may have been locked up for a long time.”
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Uganda on Thursday received two more potential vaccines for a trial against the Sudan strain of the deadly Ebola virus. Uganda has recorded 142 confirmed cases and 55 deaths since the September outbreak but has had no new cases since late November. While having no active cases is welcomed, it also means the trial will have to be revamped to test the vaccines’ effectiveness.

The World Health Organization handed Ugandan officials more than 4,000 doses of Ebola trial vaccines on Thursday — 2,000 of the Indian Serum Institute’s Oxford vaccine and just over 2,000 from U.S. manufacturer Merck.

It brings the total number of Ebola vaccine doses available in Uganda to more than 5,000 after an initial 1,000 from the U.S.’s Sabin Vaccine Institute were received last week.

The vaccines were sent for use in a trial against an outbreak of the Sudan strain of the virus that since September killed 55 people.  

But Uganda has not recorded any new Ebola infections since November 27.

While that success in halting the outbreak has been welcomed, Uganda’s Health Minister Jane Ruth Aceng said it also means plans will have to be changed to test the vaccines on people who had contact with those infected.

“There are no more cases and no more contacts,” she said. “So, the scientists are evaluating alternative research designs to assess the usefulness of these vaccines in protecting people against Ebola infection.”

The principal investigator of the Ebola vaccine trial, Dr. Bruce Kirenga, said his team is engaging communities but will have to wait for a global expert meeting on January 12 to finalize and approve the trial revamp.

“The trial that we have is designed to answer three questions, abbreviated as I-S-E. Immunogenicity, Efficacy, and Safety,” he said. “These vaccines, can they induce immunity in people if they are administered? Are they safe? Can that immunity prevent disease?”

Yonas Tegegn Woldemariam, the WHO country representative for Uganda, said the country’s success in stemming the outbreak means it has gained the capacity, knowledge, and skills to carry out an Ebola Sudan strain vaccine trial.  

He said the trial is still worth doing, even if Uganda doesn’t register another Ebola infection.  

“Uganda would contribute from this trial, another tool for us to manage Ebola Sudan if it ever happens in a major population,” he said.

Since Uganda announced the Ebola outbreak 100 days ago, aside from confirmed cases and deaths, the country recorded 87 discharges.

Despite having no new cases since November, Uganda will have to wait until January 10 to declare the country Ebola-free.   

There is currently no effective vaccine available for the Sudan strain of Ebola.

The WHO says Uganda’s last Ebola outbreak in 2019 was triggered by the more common Zaire strain.  

Uganda last reported an outbreak of the relatively rare Sudan strain in 2012.
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As farmers in the United States are coping with rising input costs, some are turning to environmentally beneficial methods to curb expenses and make money while sequestering a driver of climate change. VOA’s Kane Farabaugh has more from Glasgow, Illinois.
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The World Health Organization is concerned about a spike in COVID-19 infections in China and is supporting the government to focus its efforts on vaccinating people at the highest risk across the country, the head of the U.N. agency said on Wednesday.

Infections have recently spiked in the world’s second-largest economy and projections have suggested China could face an explosion of cases and more than a million deaths next year.

“The WHO is very concerned over the evolving situation in China, with increasing reports of severe disease,” Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters.

Tedros said the agency needed more detailed information on disease severity, hospital admissions and requirements for intensive care units support for a comprehensive assessment of the situation.

The comment comes as the German government confirmed it has sent its first batch of BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines to China to be administered initially to German expatriates.
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It could be the end of the red dusty line for NASA’s InSight lander, which has fallen silent after four years on Mars.

The lander’s power levels have been dwindling for months because of all the dust coating its solar panels. Ground controllers at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory knew the end was near, but NASA reported that InSight unexpectedly didn’t respond to communications from Earth on Sunday.

“It’s assumed InSight may have reached the end of its operations,” NASA said late Monday, adding that its last communication was Thursday. “It’s unknown what prompted the change in its energy.”

The team will keep trying to contact InSight, just in case.

InSight landed on Mars in 2018 and was the first spacecraft to document a marsquake. It detected more than 1,300 quakes with its French-built seismometer, including several caused by meteoroid strikes. The most recent marsquake sensed by InSight, earlier this year, left the ground shaking for at least six hours, according to NASA.

The seismometer readings shed light on Mars’ interior.

Just last week, scientists revealed that InSight scored another first, capturing a Martian dust devil not just in pictures, but in sound as well. In a stroke of luck, the whirling column of dust blew directly over the lander in 2021 when its microphone was on.

The lander’s other main instrument, however, encountered nothing but trouble.

A German digging device — meant to measure the temperature of Mars’ interior — never made it deeper than half a meter (a couple of feet), well short of the intended 5 meters (16 feet). NASA declared it dead nearly two years ago.

InSight recently sent back one last selfie, shared by NASA via Twitter on Monday.

“My power’s really low, so this may be the last image I can send,” the team wrote on InSight’s behalf. “Don’t worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will — but I’ll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me.”

NASA still has two active rovers on Mars: Curiosity, roaming the surface since 2012, and Perseverance, which arrived early last year.

Perseverance is in the midst of creating a sample depot; the plan is to leave 10 tubes of rock cores on the Martian surface as a backup to samples on the rover itself. NASA plans to bring some of these samples back to Earth in a decade, in its longtime search for signs of ancient microscopic life on Mars.

Perseverance also has a companion: a mini helicopter named Ingenuity. It just completed its 37th flight and has now logged more than an hour of Martian flight time.
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Scientists have uncovered new clues about a curious fossil site in Nevada, a graveyard for dozens of giant marine reptiles. Instead of the site of a massive die-off as suspected, it might have been an ancient maternity ward where the creatures came to give birth.

The site is famous for its fossils from giant ichthyosaurs — reptiles that dominated the ancient seas and could grow up to the size of a school bus. The creatures — the name means fish lizard — were underwater predators with large paddle-shaped flippers and long jaws full of teeth.

Since the ichthyosaur bones in Nevada were excavated in the 1950s, many paleontologists have investigated how all these creatures could have died together. Now, researchers have proposed a different theory in a study published Monday in the journal Current Biology.

“Several lines of evidence all kind of point towards one argument here: That this was a place where giant ichthyosaurs came to give birth,” said co-author Nicholas Pyenson, curator of fossil marine mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Once a tropical sea, the site — part of Nevada’s Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park — now sits in a dry, dusty landscape near an abandoned mining town, said lead author Randy Irmis, a paleontologist at the University of Utah.

To get a better look at the massive skeletons, which boast vertebrae the size of dinner plates and bones from their flippers as thick as boulders, researchers used 3D scanning to create a detailed digital model, Irmis said.

They identified fossils from at least 37 ichthyosaurs scattered around the area, dating back about 230 million years. The bones were preserved in different rock layers, suggesting the creatures could have died hundreds of thousands of years apart rather than all at once, Pyenson said.

A major break came when the researchers spotted some tiny bones among the massive adult fossils, and realized they belonged to embryos and newborns, Pyenson said. The researchers concluded that the creatures traveled to the site in groups for protection as they gave birth, like today’s marine giants. The fossils are believed to be from the mothers and offspring that died there over the years.

“Finding a place to give birth separated from a place where you might feed is really common in the modern world — among whales, among sharks,” Pyenson said.

Other clues helped rule out some previous explanations.

Testing the chemicals in the dirt didn’t turn up any signs of volcanic eruptions or huge shifts to the local environment. And the geology showed that the reptiles were preserved on the ocean floor pretty far from the shore — meaning they probably didn’t die in a mass beaching event, Irmis said.

The new study offers a plausible explanation for a site that’s baffled paleontologists for decades, said Dean Lomax, an ichthyosaur specialist at England’s University of Manchester who was not involved with the research.

The case may not be fully closed yet but the study “really helps to unlock a little bit more about this fascinating site,” Lomax said.
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Negotiators reached a historic deal at a U.N. biodiversity conference early Monday that would represent the most significant effort to protect the world’s lands and oceans and provide critical financing to save biodiversity in the developing world.

The global framework comes on the day the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, or COP15, is set to end in Montreal. China, which holds the presidency at this conference, released a new draft on Sunday that gave the sometimes-contentious talks much-needed momentum.

“We have in our hands a package which I think can guide us as we all work together to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put biodiversity on the path to recovery for the benefit of all people in the world,” Chinese Environment Minister Huang Runqiu told delegates before the package was adopted to rapturous applause just before dawn. “We can be truly proud.”

The most significant part of the agreement is a commitment to protect 30% of land and water considered important for biodiversity by 2030, known as 30 by 30. Currently, 17% of terrestrial and 10% of marine areas are protected.

The deal also calls for raising $200 billion by 2030 for biodiversity from a range of sources and working to phase out or reform subsidies that could provide another $500 billion for nature. As part of the financing package, the framework asks for increasing to at least $20 billion annually by 2025 the money that goes to poor countries. That number would increase to $30 billion each year by 2030.

Financing emerged late in the talks and risked derailing an agreement. Several African countries held up the final deal for almost nine hours. They wanted the creation of a new fund for biodiversity but agreed to the creation of one under the pre-existing Global Environmental Facility (GEF).

“Creating a fund under the GEF is the best way to obtain something immediate and efficient,” said Christophe Béchu, France’s minister for ecological transition who headed its delegation, adding that a completely new fund would have taken several years to establish and deprived developing countries of immediate cash for biodiversity.

Then as the agreement was about to be adopted, Congo stood up and said it opposed the deal because it didn’t set up that special biodiversity fund to provide developing countries with $100 billion by 2030.

Huang swept aside the opposition and the documents that make up the framework were adopted. The convention’s legal expert ruled Congo never formally objected to the document. Several other African countries, including Cameroon and Uganda, sided to no avail with Congo and said they would lodge a complaint.

“Many of us wanted more things in the text and more ambition, but we got an ambitious package,” Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change Steven Guilbeault said. “We have 30 by 30. Six months ago, who would have thought we could 30 by 30 in Montreal? We have an agreement to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, to work on restoration, to reduce the use of pesticides. This is tremendous progress.”

France’s Béchu called it a “historical deal.”

“It’s not a small deal. It’s a deal with very precise and quantified objectives on pesticides, on reduction of loss of species, on eliminating bad subsidies,” he said. “We double until 2025 and triple until 2030 the finance for biodiversity.”

The ministers and government officials from about 190 countries have mostly agreed that protecting biodiversity has to be a priority, with many comparing those efforts to climate talks that wrapped up last month in Egypt.

Climate change coupled with habitat loss, pollution and development have hammered the world’s biodiversity, with one estimate in 2019 warning that a million plant and animal species face extinction within decades — a rate of loss 1,000 times greater than expected. Humans use about 50,000 wild species routinely, and 1 out of 5 people of the world’s 8 billion population depend on those species for food and income, the report said.

But the government officials struggled for nearly two weeks to agree on what that protection looks like and who will pay for it.

The financing has been among the most contentious issues, with delegates from 70 African, South American and Asian countries walking out of negotiations Wednesday. They returned several hours later.

Brazil, speaking for developing countries during the week, said in a statement that a new funding mechanism dedicated to biodiversity should be established and that developed countries provide $100 billion annually in financial grants to emerging economies until 2030.

“All the elements are in there for a balance of unhappiness which is the secret to achieving agreement in U.N. bodies,” Pierre du Plessis, a negotiator from Namibia who is helping coordinate the African group, told The Associated Press before the vote. “Everyone got a bit of what they wanted, not necessarily everything they wanted.”

There were supporters of the framework who said it fell short in several areas.

The Wildlife Conservation Society and other environmental groups were concerned that the deal puts off until 2050 a goal of preventing the extinction of species, preserving the integrity of ecosystems and maintaining the genetic diversity within populations. They fear that timeline is not ambitious enough.

Some advocates also wanted tougher language around subsidies that make food and fuel so cheap in many parts of the world. The document only calls for identifying subsidies by 2025 that can be reformed or phased out and working to reduce them by 2030.

“The new text is a mixed bag,” Andrew Deutz, director of global policy, institutions and conservation finance for The Nature Conservancy, said. “It contains some strong signals on finance and biodiversity, but it fails to advance beyond the targets of 10 years ago in terms of addressing drivers of biodiversity loss in productive sectors like agriculture, fisheries and infrastructure and thus still risks being fully transformational.”
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