Much Ado About Numbers: Disenchantment and Diversion at the COP 15 Business & Biodiversity Forum

Ashley Light

Ashley Light is in her third year at McGill Law, where she has developed a passion for the administrative and constitutional law aspects of environmental law. Prior to studying law, she completed a BSc in Conservation Biology. Born and raised in Alberta, Ashley’s passion for the environment and the outdoors began in the Rocky Mountains, and in her free time she still loves to hike, cycle, ski, and birdwatch. Ashley an Executive Editor at McGill Journal of Sustainable Development Law.

United Nations international environmental conferences, such as COP15 and the more well-known climate COPs, are often criticized for being “all talk and no action.” This criticism is justifiable, as these conferences often culminate in ambitious targets that do not produce concrete action. For example, at the 2010 CBD conference, Canada committed to the Aichi Targets[1]— including to protect 17 percent of terrestrial areas and inland water—yet has failed to meet most of these targets in advance of hosting COP15.[2] With this in mind, I attended COP15 with a healthy skepticism. I was particularly suspicious about the Business and Biodiversity Forum. 

To my surprise, the moderator of the opening panel addressed the source of my skepticism early on. Jorge Laguna-Celis, Head of the One Planet Network, asked panellists to identify specific challenges that have hindered the realization of conservation goals. One after another, the panellists expressed that a main challenge for businesses in actualizing biodiversity goals was the need for biodiversity data and measurement.

Business leaders unanimously agreed that biodiversity conservation goals can only lead to action if biodiversity is quantified in a way that is legible to businesses and capital markets. The logic underlying this assertion is that biodiversity loss is a market failure that would be corrected if we were better able to quantify biodiversity and provide this information to the discerning consumers and the unerring market. The final targets set at COP15 also reflect this logic. For example, Target 15 is to ensure that businesses—particularly large and transnational companies and financial institutions—monitor and disclose their risks, dependencies, and impacts on biodiversity.[3]

Throughout the two-day Business and Biodiversity Forum, the call for biodiversity data resurfaced again and again as a silver bullet solution to the biodiversity crisis, and I wondered why; why do business leaders insist that if the biodiversity crisis can be measured, it can be solved by the same system that has caused it in the first place?

Upon reflection, I recalled some of the scholarship I had read during my first-year legal theory course, particularly the work of Max Weber and others on the role of disenchantment in Western society. Weber popularized this term in 1918, theorizing that the advent of the scientific method and Enlightenment reason began a societal shift away from mysticism and religion and towards science and rationality.[4] The natural world is “knowable, predictable, and manipulable by humans.”[5] Disenchantment has rendered humans the masters of nature; we can measure and quantify all things, explain how they work, and use them to our advantage. In the context of biodiversity conservation, disenchantment underlies the notion that if we can measure biodiversity, we can master it and prevent biodiversity loss.

A more straightforward (and cynical) explanation for why business leaders are fixated on biodiversity measurement is that they are trying to buy time. Rather than believing that human ingenuity can solve this problem if we have the necessary data, calls for biodiversity data could be a diversion meant to give the appearance of action while withholding concrete guarantees.[6

Both explanations, philosophical and practical, lead me to the same conclusion: we cannot bridge the gap between talk and action on biodiversity loss with data alone. The more significant challenge that has prevented conservation goals from becoming actions is the unwillingness of governments and business leaders to make difficult choices to address them. The COP15 Biodiversity and Business forum demonstrated that the business community is ready to measure biodiversity loss, but for one reason or another, they are not prepared to act to prevent it.

[1] See Convention on Biological Diversity, “Canada – National Targets” (13 September 2020), online: Convention on Biological Diversity <cbd.int/countries/targets/?country=ca>.

[2] See David Geselbracht & Stephen Hazell, “Canada has biodiversity targets. Now it needs accountability”, The Narwhal, (14 October 2021), online: <thenarwhal.ca/canada-biodiversity-aichi-targets/>.

[3] See Convention on Biological Diversity, “COP15: Nations Adopt Four Goals, 23 Targets for 2030 in Landmark Biodiversity Agreement” (19 December 2022), online: Convention on Biological Diversity <cbd.int/article/cop15-cbd-press-release-final-19dec2022>.

[4] See Max Weber, “Science as Vocation” in HH Gerth & C Wright Mills, eds, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, (Oxon, UK: Routledge, 2009) 129 at 139, 154.

[5] Richard Jenkins, “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-Enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium” (2000) 1:1 Max Weber Studies 11 at 12.

[6] See Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, (Chicago, Ill: University of Illinois Press, 1964) at 695–704.