At COP15 Mrema is Wrong — Guterres is Right

CBD Secretary Mrema “doesn’t believe” there is a conflict between GDP growth and biodiversity conservation, despite the overwhelming evidence for a fundamental conflict, and despite the warning of UN Secretary General Guterres. Given that the bloating global economy is the ultimate and aggregate threat to biodiversity, Secretary Mrema should retract her “belief” or be replaced.

Montreal, December 13, 2022—During a press briefing on 12/12/2022, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, stated she didn’t “believe” there was a conflict between economic growth and biodiversity conservation. Her “belief” runs contrary to UN Secretary General António Guterres, who kicked off the conference by noting, “With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.”

Secretary Mrema is behind the times, still harboring a fallacious belief in “green growth.” Meanwhile, hundreds of delegates and conferees have signed the CASSE position on economic growth describing the “fundamental conflict between economic growth and biodiversity conservation.”

Despite the $88 trillion GDP extinguishing species, displacing habitats, polluting air and water, acidifying oceans, bleaching coral reefs, melting glaciers and ice caps, and pumping forever chemicals into our soils and aquifers, Mrema fuzzily thinks we can have our cake and eat it too: continue growing an already-devastating GDP while reversing the Sixth Mass Extinction.

Secretary Mrema—an outstanding leader in other ways—is WRONG about GDP vs. biodiversity. E.O. Wilson, Jane Goodall, David Suzuki and many other world-class conservation scientists have spoken out about the fundamental conflict between GDP growth and biodiversity. While some countries do need economic growth, as no one would deny, growth won’t magically occur without impacting biodiversity.

With all the calls for “30 by 30,” or even “Half-Earth” — whereby much of the planet must be protected from economic activity, it should be obvious that the proper economic policy would be not growth for most countries, but rather the steady state economy (and even degrowth in countries with rapacious ecological footprints). In other words, biodiversity conservation calls for “steady statesmanship” in international diplomacy. Unless Secretary Mrema can recognize and acknowledge this, she should be replaced by someone who can and will.

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For more information, contact CASSE at [email protected] or Brian Czech at 703-901-7190.