*Cop15 deal includes target to protect 30% of nature on Earth by 2030.*

The basic question is, will countries give this more than lip service? For instance, most of the UK's "protected marine areas" are hardly protected at all.

The article claims that China imposed the deal despite objections from many countries. Given that the survival of civilization and the natural world are at stake, I feel little sympathy for anyone that refuses to help save But these objections may make the treaty a dead letter.

The biodiversity movement seems to have adopted as a matter of faith that indigenous humans will always protect biodiversity and ecosystems. In many cases they will, because they depend on those ecosystems for their living. In those cases, damage to those ecosystems will harm them so they will oppose such damage.

But this is not invariably guaranteed. Human beings have been polluting their environments for short-term benefit for millennia. Humans often bend and redraw their moral rules to excuse their own benefit. Humans can resist this tendency, but nobody is automatically above it due to descent alone.

The part of this agreement that is absolutely perverse: the plan to establish a parallel patent system in the name of preventing "biopiracy." The patent system we already have is harmful and unjust; this plan creates a second parallel system of restrictions on the use of knowledge, adds a second harm, a second injustice, to the first.

The goal, clearly, is to give some income to poor countries. That goal is fine, but do it in some other way!