The United States is, by many measures, a global environmental leader, barring four years under former President Donald Trump. It has some of the strongest environmental laws in the world, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act. The country invests billions of dollars to fight climate change and wildlife declines. It also produces much of the world’s leading environmental research.
Every country is negotiating a plan to save nature. Except the US.
Why won’t the US join the most important treaty to protect the natural world?
The current administration, led by President Joe Biden, prides itself on these environmental achievements.
That’s what makes this so surprising: The US is the only nation in the world, other than the Vatican, that hasn’t joined the most important global treaty to conserve nature. The treaty, known as the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), is designed to safeguard Earth’s life support systems, its animals, and ecosystems. And it’s not just some inconsequential agreement: It’s the best shot the world has at staving off ecological collapse.
This week, the Convention is meeting in Cali, Colombia, for an event known as COP16. Its members — governments from more than 190 countries — are negotiating plans for protecting forests and oceans, including how to raise around $700 billion for conservation. Critically, it’s the first meeting under the Convention since 2022, when its members agreed to a historic deal to stop biodiversity loss, known as the Global Biodiversity Framework. The framework includes 23 targets to reach by 2030, including conserving at least 30 percent of all land and ocean.
The US does have a presence at COP16. The country sent more than three dozen federal officials from the State Department, the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), and other divisions. And these representatives can influence the negotiations, two senior government officials told Vox.
“We’re not a party and that’s terrible,” Brenda Mallory, the CEQ chair, told Vox. “Just from a messaging perspective, we should be here.” But, she added, “people are talking to us, they are listening to us. We do have influence.”
As non-members to the Convention, that influence has a clear limit. The US can’t formally participate in negotiations or object to decisions at COP16. Those decisions could be administrative — such as where COP17 will take place — or relate to, say, what big drug companies should pay for using the DNA of wild organisms. The US is also noticeably absent from public discussions among environmental ministers that anchor COP16.
This is a problem, experts told Vox. Fixing the biodiversity crisis is an enormous task, and one that requires reforming entire industries and financial flows that harm nature, such as industrial agriculture and the subsidies that uphold it. As the planet’s largest economy, the US controls many of those sectors.
“If we’re not in to solve this global challenge — this tragedy in the commons — [that] provides an excuse for others to do less,” Wade Crowfoot, California’s natural resources secretary, told Vox. “That’s a real problem.”
So why doesn’t the US have a seat at the table?
President George H.W. Bush refused to sign a biodiversity treaty that the US helped craft
Nearly half a century ago, scientists were already warning that scores of species were at risk of going extinct — just as they are today. In fact, headlines from the time are eerily familiar: “Scientists say a million species are in danger,” read one in 1981, which is almost identical to a 2019 headline.
Those concerns ignited a series of meetings among environmental groups and UN officials, in the ’80s and early ’90s, that laid the groundwork for a treaty to protect biodiversity. US diplomats were very much involved in these discussions, said William Snape III, an environmental lawyer and an assistant dean at American University and senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, an advocacy group.
“It was the United States who championed the idea of a Biodiversity Treaty in the 1980s, and was influential in getting the effort off the ground in the early 1990s,” Snape wrote in the journal Sustainable Development Law & Policy in 2010.
In the summer of 1992, CBD opened for signature at a big UN conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It laid out three goals: conserve biodiversity (from genes to ecosystems), use its components in a sustainable way, and share the various benefits of genetic resources fairly.
Dozens of countries signed the agreement then and there, including the UK, China, and Canada. But the US — then under President George H.W. Bush — was notably not one of them. And it largely came down to politics: It was an election year that pitted Bush against then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, and a number of senators in Bush’s party opposed signing the treaty, citing a wide range of concerns.
Among them was a fear that US biotech companies would have to share their intellectual property related to genetics with other countries. There were also widespread concerns that the US would be responsible for helping poorer nations — financially and otherwise — protect their natural resources and that the agreement would put more environmental regulations in place in the US. (At the time, there was already pushback among the timber industry and property rights groups on existing environmental laws, including the Endangered Species Act.)
Some industries also opposed signing. As environmental lawyer Robert Blomquist wrote in a 2002 article for the Golden Gate University Law Review, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association and Industrial Biotechnology Association both sent letters to Bush stating that they were opposed to the US signing the CBD due to concerns related to intellectual property rights.
President Clinton signed the treaty but failed to find support for ratification
In 1992, Clinton won the election and, in a move hailed by conservationists, signed the treaty shortly after taking office. But there was still a major hurdle to joining CBD: ratification by the Senate, which requires 67 votes.
Clinton was well aware of the CBD opposition in Congress. So when he sent the treaty to the Senate for ratification in 1993, he included with it seven “understandings” that sought to dispel concerns related to IP and sovereignty. Essentially, they make it clear that, as party to the agreement, the US would not be forced to do anything, and it would retain sovereignty over its natural resources, Snape writes. Clinton also emphasized that the US already had strong environmental laws and wouldn’t need to create more of them to meet CBD’s goals.
In a promising step, the bipartisan Senate Foreign Relations Committee overwhelmingly recommended that the Senate ratify the treaty, making it seem all but certain to pass. At that point, the biotech industry had also thrown its support behind the agreement, Blomquist wrote.
Nonetheless, then-GOP Sens. Jesse Helms and Bob Dole, along with many of their colleagues, blocked ratification of the convention from ever coming to a vote, Snape said, repeating the same arguments. The treaty languished on the Senate floor.
And that pretty much brings us up to speed: No president has introduced the treaty for ratification since.
GOP lawmakers still resist treaties — any treaties
Three decades later, concerns related to American sovereignty persist, especially within the Republican Party, and keep the US out of treaties. Conservative lawmakers stand in the way of not only the CBD but also several other treaties awaiting ratification by the Senate, including the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons With Disabilities.
“Conservative nationalists in the United States (including the Senate) have long mistrusted international agreements,” Stewart Patrick, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Vox in 2021. They view them, he added, “as efforts by the United Nations and foreign governments to impose constraints on US constitutional independence, interfere with US private sector activity, as well as create redistributionist schemes.”
In other words, not a whole lot has changed.
In 2021, a week after Biden was sworn into office, the Heritage Foundation, an influential right-wing think tank, published a report calling on the Senate to oppose a handful of treaties while he’s in office, “on the grounds that they threaten the sovereignty of the United States.” They include the CBD, the Arms Trade Treaty, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, among others. (Environmental treaties like the CBD tend to draw a stronger opposition from conservative lawmakers, who often fear environmental regulations, relative to other agreements, Snape said.)
Legal experts say concerns related to sovereignty aren’t justified. The agreement spells out that countries retain jurisdiction over their own environment. Indeed, US negotiators made sure of it when helping craft the agreement in the ’90s, Patrick wrote in World Politics Review in 2021. “States have ... the sovereign right to exploit their own resources pursuant to their own environmental policies,” CBD’s Article 3 reads. (Article 3 goes on to say that states are also responsible for making sure they don’t harm the environment in other countries.)
“The convention poses no threat to US sovereignty,” wrote Patrick, author of The Sovereignty Wars.
And what about the other concerns? The agreement stipulates that any transfer of genetic technology to poorer nations must adhere to IP rights in wealthier nations, Patrick writes. Clinton’s seven understandings also affirmed that joining CBD wouldn’t weaken American IP rights and clarified that the treaty can’t force the US to contribute a certain amount of financial resources.
Joining the CBD is also unlikely to require anything in the way of new domestic environmental policies, Snape and Patrick said. “The US is already in compliance with the treaty’s substantive terms: It possesses a highly developed system of protected natural areas, and has policies in place to reduce biodiversity loss in environmentally sensitive areas,” Patrick wrote.
Will the US ever join the CBD?
The US embraces the objectives of the Convention, including conserving and sharing the benefits of nature, a senior State Department official told Vox. Under the Biden administration, the country is also working toward some of the same targets that are in the Global Biodiversity Framework — that landmark deal under the Convention, forged in 2022, to stop biodiversity loss. In his first days in office, Biden pledged to conserve 30 percent of all land and ocean by 2030, a key target under the 2022 framework.
The US is on track to meet that goal, known as “30 by 30,” Mallory, of CEQ, said at an event Tuesday at COP16. The White House says it has conserved roughly a third of its oceans (a claim that some scientists and environmental advocates contest). The government hasn’t yet released a similar figure for land. About 13 percent of US land is within protected areas, like national parks, though that doesn’t include areas that are more broadly defined as “conserved.”
“For the past four years, President Biden and Vice President Harris have delivered the most ambitious domestic climate change and conservation agenda in our nation’s history,” Mallory said Tuesday.
The US does not, however, support the Global Biodiversity Framework in its entirety, the State Department told Vox. The government doesn’t endorse a few of the framework’s targets related to the private sector, including one aimed at reducing government subsidies that harm the environment and increasing spending on foreign aid for conservation. That’s partly because decisions regarding government spending often require congressional approval.
US representatives can’t unilaterally agree to financial targets.
This brings us, again, to what is ultimately the barrier to stronger US environmental action: Congress. Reforming industries that harm nature and funding conservation will require approval from a heavily divided Congress, as will joining the Convention on Biological Diversity.
For the foreseeable future, the votes are just not there.
Then there’s the specter of a potential four more years under Donald Trump. Should the former president win the election, the chance of joining the CBD will only narrow, Patrick said. Some of the targets under the Global Biodiversity Framework — such as the goal to conserve 30 percent of US land — are “totally anathema to any potential Trump administration,” Patrick said.
That ultimately makes it harder for the Convention, this life-sustaining treaty, to get anything done.
“The world is in the throes of an ecological emergency,” Patrick said. “Given the scale of that, it’s embarrassing to have the United States be AWOL. It just undermines what is already a really heavy lift.”
Cover photo: In his first days in office, President Joe Biden pledged to conserve 30 percent of all land and ocean by 2030. Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images
