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« Il ne peut y avoir aucun abaissement de l’ambition convenue. » C’est l’annonce qu’a faite le ministre d’État irlandais Christopher O’Sullivan au nom de la présidence du Conseil lorsqu’il a présenté le 12 octobre la position que l’Union européenne défendra à Erevan, où se tient depuis le 19 octobre la dix-septième conférence des parties à la Convention sur la diversité biologique . Si l’Union peut se permettre ce ton, c’est parce qu’elle fait figure de bonne élève. Le cadre mondial adopté à la COP15 en 2022 fixe l’objectif de protéger 30 % des terres et des mers d’ici 2030 et l’Union avait atteint, fin 2022, 26,1 % de ses terres et 12,3 % de ses mers, quand la moyenne mondiale plafonne respectivement à 18,4 et 10 % .
This leadership stance, however, contrasts with certain European decisions taken over the past two years. For instance, it has doubled, from 5% to 10%, the decline of permanent grasslands that the Common Agricultural Policy tolerates before forcing Member States to act. The wolf, meanwhile, has been removed from the list of strictly protected species, a first for a species benefiting from that status under European law. The Habitats and Birds Directives, which have underpinned Europe’s nature policy for more than thirty years, are now subjected to a “resilience test,” through which the Commission intends to verify that they meet their objectives at the lowest cost and reduce the “unnecessary administrative burden” they would impose. Finally, the implementation of the regulation against imported deforestation has been postponed for the second time, and due diligence as well as sustainability reporting obligations for companies have been eased.
Le meilleur élève de la COP biodiversité desserre visiblement ses propres législations. Mais ce paradoxe en dit moins sur l’Europe que sur la COP elle-même. Pour le comprendre, regardons de plus près ce qu’est une COP biodiversité.
An architecture borrowed from the climate
In the public arena, the term COP is above all associated with climate questions. Biodiversity COP is spoken of very little, and when it is mentioned at all, it remains relegated to the role of a little sister to the climate COP. For although the two conventions were born together at the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992, climate policy built its institutions first, and biodiversity followed in its footsteps.
This mimicking is reflected in the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), created in 2012 on the model of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Likewise, the global framework adopted at Kunming-Montreal in December 2022, which sets twenty-three targets for 2030, was hailed as the “Paris moment” of biodiversity, in reference to the Paris Agreement of 2015, because each COP has adopted its benchmark figure: 1.5 °C for climate, 30% of land and seas protected by 2030 for biodiversity, a target promptly nicknamed “30×30.” Since July 2025, the European Commission has also proposed “nature credits” designed on the model of carbon credits. And today, the COP in Yerevan must produce the global review of the Kunming-Montreal framework, which is nothing other than the biodiversity counterpart to the first global climate assessment drafted in Dubai in 2023.
The freedom is at the heart of the ecological debate, and surprisingly the doctrines that contribute to it have sidestepped it rather than confronted it.
Lauriane Mouysset
Nevertheless, the preparatory meetings for this global review, held this summer in Nairobi, concluded that, without rapid acceleration, none of the twenty-three targets of the framework will be achieved by 2030. But this failure is not new, for the previous framework fared the same: in 2020, none of the twenty Aichi targets, set in 2010 for the decade, had been fully achieved. Two successive frameworks, backed by different governments and anchored to different targets, ending in the same result, invite reflection on what they have in common and on what could be responsible for these failures, beyond the usual budget problems or lobbies.
Their common denominator is this heritage, drawn from climate institutions and their very particular logic, that of aggregation: a single object, measured everywhere in the same unit, which allows the publication of quantified national accounts, comparing the trajectories of countries, and then measuring their deviation from predetermined targets. Nothing guarantees that such a system works for biodiversity.
A lucid convention on biodiversity
If climate has not revealed all its secrets, its science is today sufficiently established to reason in probabilities: the IPCC judges the human influence on warming to be “unequivocal,” and estimates that a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide would likely warm the planet by 2.5 to 4 °C. For biodiversity, knowledge is more piecemeal. About 2 million species have been described, out of an estimated total of around 8.7 million. This knowledge is also uneven: mammals are well inventoried, microorganisms far less so. Likewise, terrestrial environments are better studied than the ocean depths. The Convention on Biological Diversity recognized this specificity from its preamble in 1992, stating that in the face of a significant threat, the absence of complete scientific certainty should not be used as a pretext to delay measures.
But far from being only a matter for scientists, the two faces of the ecological crisis also differ in the place society occupies. The climate crisis is fundamentally global: one ton of carbon emitted in Lyon weighs on the climate as much as one ton emitted in Shanghai. What matters for climate is the total quantity of emissions, and what matters in negotiations is the coordination of emission reductions, and, since the 2022 Sharm el-Sheikh COP, the creation of a fund for losses and damages suffered by countries less responsible for warming. It is no surprise that the climate issue has long remained confined to expert and diplomatic circles, with businesses and households being called upon only from above to shape their behavior through economic or legislative instruments.
The best student of the biodiversity COP is loosening its own laws. But this paradox says less about Europe than about the COP itself.
Lauriane Mouysset
But this equivalence of carbon tonnes does not work for biodiversity. A meadow turned over in Cantal cannot be offset by a protected forest in Lapland, because the species and the relations that disappear with it do not occur there. The biodiversity crisis is a local issue before it is an international one. And since 2000, the Convention texts have acknowledged this scaling inversion through the ecosystem approach. Its first principle states that the objectives for managing land, water, and biological resources are a matter of social choice, while the second specifies that governance should be decentralized to the lowest appropriate level and the twelfth that all sectors of society should be involved. In 2024, in Cali, the Convention continued in this direction by creating a permanent subsidiary body dedicated to Indigenous peoples and local communities.
Finally, the question of value arises. The carbon dioxide molecule weighs heavily on human societies and their economies, but almost no one gives it moral consideration: limiting warming remains primarily a material necessity. It is different for biodiversity, and here again the Convention wrote this into the very first sentence of its preamble in 1992, which opens with the “intrinsic value” of biological diversity before listing its ecological, economic, social, cultural, and aesthetic values. The next thirty years broadened the reasons to protect biodiversity: in 2005 with the services ecosystems provide to societies, with the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment; in 2010 with their economic weight and the international study The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB); in 2019 with scientific urgency, with IPBES’s global assessment which estimated that one million species were threatened with extinction; up to 2022 when a pluralism of values and worldviews was embraced, as recognized by IPBES and echoed in Kunming-Montreal.
But if the institution recognizes these specificities, why does the framework it has built continue to treat biodiversity as if it were carbon?
The Taboo of Renunciation
The answer lies in the role that the COP assigns itself. It seeks to unite sovereign states around a common framework by stating ambitions without coercion—that is, without forcing, of course, but also without addressing what will have to be renounced to achieve them. Because naming renunciations would risk alienating those who would need to consent to them.
Climate COPs have followed this line for nearly thirty years. It wasn’t until the twenty-eighth, in Dubai in 2023, that a decision called for “moving away from fossil fuels” in energy systems: finally, what would have to be renounced to advance the energy and climate transition was named. Yet this line has never prevented setting a global climate target because the climate equation is simple: one avoided tonne here is one avoided tonne elsewhere, one energy can replace another, so the objective could be fixed without explicitly spelling out the renunciation itself.
The most structurally foundational value of our societies is thus today wholly entrusted to those who work only against the ecological transition.
Lauriane Mouysset
The biodiversity framework does not have that luxury. The global biodiversity framework exists only through thousands of local targets: it cannot skip over either the partial knowledge of ecosystems on each territory or the worldviews of the stakeholders involved. To articulate them, we must make choices about our uncertainties and arbitrate within our systems of values. The equation is complex, and solving it requires making explicit the renunciations in play, their scope, and what they entail. It is precisely on this point that the biodiversity COP stalls: it would like to undertake the first step, to state the global framework, without going through the second, to spell out the renunciations, which is nevertheless its condition.
The Freedom No One Talks About
European texts speak of “simplification” or “competitiveness,” but these words defend nothing less than a freedom. For in liberal democracies, any renunciation is ultimately seen as a loss of freedom. Limiting grassland conversion touches the freedom to farm one’s land as one sees fit. Maintaining strict protection of the wolf, alongside the freedom to practice a profession, the mountain herder’s trade, without bearing the cost alone. Excluding products from the market that come from deforestation touches the freedom to trade. Requiring companies to report on their environmental impacts along their supply chains touches the freedom to undertake. Preserving habitats and birds touches the freedom to develop.
Freedom is the value that unites most in France. The Republic Barometer, conducted by Ipsos in July 2026, places it at the top of the three terms of the motto: 96% of those polled consider it important, including 74% as very important, ahead of fraternity (91%) and equality (90%). It is above all the only one of the three whose importance does not vary with political proximity. It is therefore no surprise that biodiversity demands are read as constraints, as restrictions on freedom.
But since moving forward in the biodiversity crisis cannot be imposed from above and since we need to bring society along for a better ecological reality to emerge, would this hegemonic stance on freedom not be better seen as an opportunity? If the Convention is right to spell out the plurality of values to unite worldviews, why not begin its reflection on value arbitration with the one that is both the most unifying and the reason for the retreat of legislation?
Freedom is at the heart of the ecological debate, and, surprisingly, the contemporary doctrines that contribute to it have sidestepped it rather than confronted it: each has placed a value alongside it without ever redefining it. Take, for example, the wartime ecology that ties the energy transition to power, ecological security to a “new abundance,” or ecosocialist internationalism to needs. The most foundational value of our societies is thus today wholly entrusted to those who work only against the ecological transition. Washington now states it bluntly, as in the January 20, 2025 presidential decree where the lifting of environmental constraints is presented as a “liberation” of American energy. More than ever, the biodiversity COP and, more broadly, the intellectuals of the ecological transition must formulate the trade-offs in the language of freedom, or else ambitions will yield as soon as they are attacked in that language.
A framework that recognizes pluralism without organizing arbitration leaves renunciation to be decided elsewhere, in power relations, at the mercy of electoral calendars and simplification packages.
Lauriane Mouysset
The difficulty lies in the way we unconsciously think renunciation. Influenced by a certain reading of the Enlightenment, we think of it as an amputation of freedom, as the absence of constraints. Yet our freedoms to produce, to trade, or to shape our environment rely on ecological balances that we know little about and do not control. Each of our decisions already calls on some of these balances and spares others: whether we like it or not, we are already making choices, but without knowing it and without having decided together.
The ethics of viability, grounded in the mathematical theory of the same name, makes this choice explicit. Rather than searching for the best trajectory, it delineates the set of decisions that maintain in the long run the ecological, economic, and social conditions of a society. But determining these conditions is not a matter for scientific expertise alone, since it concerns deciding what we refuse to lose: this path belongs to citizens, informed by science. The viable space thus gains clarity, because it rests on what we know about ecosystems and their dynamics, and legitimacy, because it proceeds from a collective decision. And it is precisely this double requirement that makes the limit a freedom: to be free is not to ignore limits, it is to define together, with knowledge of the consequences, the viable space in which we operate and the limits that constitute it. In this light, renunciation ceases to be an external constraint; it becomes constitutive of freedom, and with it the ecological ambition. Essentially, this is the societal choice already invoked by the first principle of the ecosystemic approach, now equipped with an ethical framework.
This project could be taken up by Europe, heir to the liberal tradition, at a moment when the United States, which never ratified the Convention and left IPBES in January, brandish freedom against ecology. If it seizes it, freedom could finally cease to be the altar on which the biodiversity COP sacrifices its ambitions, and become instead its foundation.