What the U.N.'s biodiversity agreement means for Minnesota

More than 190 countries agreed to a sweeping set of commitments and goals at a United Nations biodiversity conference last week to stem the massive loss of animal and plant life around the globe. The United States was not one of them, despite helping negotiate the deal.

The U.S. never joined the U.N.'s convention on biological diversity, leaving it and the Vatican as the only two nations not party to the deal. The Clinton administration signed the global treaty back in the early 1990s, but the Senate did not ratify it.

Even so, the Biden administration has already pledged to meet one of the most ambitious goals agreed to at the conference — to conserve 30% of all land and coastal waters by 2030. Biden also sent a special envoy to Montreal to help negotiate the rest of the targets the world agreed to meet.

The deal was announced three years after a U.N. report found that more than 1 million species are at risk of extinction. Scientists are calling it the Earth's sixth mass extinction — and the first one caused by humans. The loss is well underway in Minnesota. A Star Tribune series this year found that a variety of threats, from invasive species to urban sprawl, threaten a host of native creatures and plants such as the goblin fern, prairie chicken, Canada lynx and paddlefish.

The U.N. accord sets 23 benchmarks in the coming years, many of which will be nearly impossible to meet without U.S. support. Though not a signatory, the Biden administration and individual states could use it as a framework to set pollution and conservation goals.

Here's how Minnesota measures up to some of the most ambitious targets.

Reducing water pollution

The nations agreed to cut nutrient pollution around the globe in half by 2030. That means reducing such contaminants as nitrogen and phosphorus that wash off farms and gush from sewage plants. Nutrient pollution from Minnesota and other states in the Mississippi River Basin creates a massive dead zone for marine life in the Gulf of Mexico.

More than 730 bodies of water in Minnesota are impaired because of nutrient pollution — degraded to the point that fish are dying or the water is unsafe to swimswimmers. The pollution has been particularly deadly to certain species, such as cisco, which can no longer find enough oxygen in winter to survive in many of the state's lakes.

Minnesota agencies have tried, and failed, to reduce nutrient pollution for years. The majority of the state's excess nutrients come from the fertilizer used on row crops. In 2014, Minnesota pledged to cut nitrogen pollution by 20% in the Mississippi River by 2025. However, pollution has only increased since then. By 2020, it jumped by as much as 62% in some parts of the Mississippi, according to a progress report from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

The MPCA has largely relied on educational and voluntary programs to try to cut it back, encouraging farmers to adopt best management practices or grow cover crops.

"Obviously, voluntary efforts are not going to be enough," said state Rep. Rick Hansen, DFL-South St. Paul.

Management changes are needed and the Legislature must set enforceable standards, Hansen said.

Dan Glessing, president of the Minnesota Farm Bureau, said technology improvements over the last decade have helped cut back the amount of fertilizer that gets wasted or washes away.

"We have GPS tools now that make it so we can give the plant exactly as much as it needs in that location," he said.

A 50% cut in nutrient runoff over the next seven years is ambitious, Glessing said. But it could be met if technology continues to improve.

"You know we don't want to waste any fertilizer and we'll be sensitive to the environment, but at the same time we have to grow a crop to feed the growing population."

More time is needed to see if the programs and incentives for row crop farmers that have been put in place since 2014 will work, said David Wall, hydrologist and research scientist for the MPCA. The short-term numbers can be misleading, he said.

"The things that are going to affect those trends need decades, not years, to evaluate," Wall said.

Pesticide reductions

The U.N. agreement also seeks to cut the risk of pesticides and harmful chemicals in half by 2030. Minnesota and U.S. farmers widely use neonicotinoid insecticides — a class of chemicals banned in the European Union because it has been linked to bee, butterfly and other pollinator die-offs.

Studies have found that high concentrations of the chemicals may also cause bone and genital deformities in deer and pheasants, reducing their chances of surviving or reproducing in captive populations.

Other pesticides, largely sprayed to protect soybean crops from damaging aphids, have been linked to the sudden extirpation of the Poweshiek skipperling — a prairie butterfly with a state population that numbered in the millions about 20 years ago but is now entirely wiped out in Minnesota.

More research is needed to determine the effect that neonicotinoids have on the environment, Glessing said.

"It's a good product from our standpoint," he said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sets the standards for pesticide use.

"I trust their science," Glessing said.

Business disclosures

The U.N. agreement calls on all countries to require businesses, especially large companies with a multinational presence, to assess, monitor and disclose their impact on biodiversity. That would include a number of Minnesota's biggest companies, including Cargill, Target, 3M and Best Buy, among others.

"These big transnational companies know they're going to have to do this at some point," said Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity and infrastructure policy for the Nature Conservancy, an environmental group.

Target and 3M representatives declined to be interviewed. Cargill and Best Buy officials did not respond to phone calls and messages seeking comment.

Conserving land

Perhaps the single most ambitious goal is to conserve 30% of the land and coastal waters around the globe.

By any measure, Minnesota is well short of the goal, which it has not adopted. About 7% of Minnesota's land and water is permanently protected, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. That number rises to 18% if it includes protected areas that allow multiple uses such as logging, mining and off-road vehicle riding.

Specifically, the deal includes a promise to reduce the loss of ecosystems of "high ecological integrity" to near zero.

"That's so important to Minnesota because that includes the Boundary Waters," said Jeannine Cavender-Bares, a professor of ecology, evolution and behavior at the University of Minnesota.

The strength of the agreement is that the targets are precise and measurable, she said.

"They are specific and we know how to monitor for them, and we should be able to see if we're on target."

But achieving the goals will likely depend on the good faith of the nations that agreed to them and, in the case of the U.S., on the commitment of the executive branch, Cavender-Bares said.

"What we've seen is that when we have clear-stated goals, people can organize themselves around them."