MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 93 of 100

Correct — option (4), which nominates statements A, C and D. The meeting the paper calls 'UN COP 15' is the fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and its decisive session was held at Montreal in Canada from 7 to 19 December 2022. Statement A is correct: this conference adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the landmark agreement that replaced the earlier Aichi targets and set the world's biodiversity goals to 2030 and 2050. Statement C is correct and explains the agreement's double name: China held the presidency of COP15 throughout, having hosted the first and largely virtual part of the conference from Kunming in 2021, and asked Canada to host the resumed session in Montreal because its zero-COVID restrictions made an in-person meeting in China impracticable. The presidency stayed with China even though the venue moved, which is why the framework carries both city names. Statement D is correct as a description of the framework's content: it commits parties to protect thirty per cent of land and of oceans by 2030 and to restore thirty per cent of degraded ecosystems, to reduce the rate of human-induced extinction of threatened species tenfold by 2050, to halve food waste, and it addresses the interaction between biodiversity loss and climate change directly, since the two crises reinforce each other. That leaves statement B, which is simply the contradiction of statement C: the presidency was China's, not America's. Statements B and C cannot both stand, and the three wrong options all contain B — which means a candidate who establishes that B is false has answered the question without needing to test anything else. Option (4) is the answer.

• (1)A and B are correct — 'A and B are correct' pairs a true statement with the false one. Statement A is right — the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted at this conference — but statement B assigns the presidency to America, and the presidency of COP15 was held by China. It is worth being clear about what a COP presidency is, because the confusion in this question depends on the distinction: the presidency belongs to the party that convenes and chairs the session and steers the negotiation, while the host is the country that provides the venue. Here the two came apart, with China presiding and Canada hosting, which is unusual and is exactly why an examiner found the point worth testing. The United States is not even a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity, having signed but never ratified it, so it could not have held the presidency of a conference of its parties at all.
• (2)B and D are correct — 'B and D are correct' admits the false presidency statement and one true statement about the agreement's content. Statement D is accurate: the framework requires efforts on the consequences of climate change and on the conservation of threatened species, and its targets include reducing the rate of human-induced extinction tenfold by 2050 and protecting thirty per cent of land and sea by 2030. But statement B is false, and the option also discards statements A and C, both of which are correct. The structural observation that saves time here is that statements B and C are mutually exclusive, since they name different countries for the same presidency; every option except the fourth contains B, so eliminating B eliminates three options at once. That is a large return on a single recalled fact, and it is the shape of many statement questions in this paper.
• (3)B and C are correct — 'B and C are correct' is self-contradictory on its face, because statement B says the agreement was concluded under the presidency of America and statement C says China presided over the same conference. A single conference has a single presidency, so the two statements cannot both be true, and an option that admits both is unsound whatever the facts turn out to be. Noticing that costs nothing and requires no knowledge of the conference at all. On the facts, statement C is the one that stands: China held the COP15 presidency from the first part of the conference at Kunming in 2021 through the resumed session at Montreal in December 2022. This option also excludes statements A and D, which are both accurate descriptions of what was adopted and what it contains, so it fails on every count available.

The Convention on Biological Diversity was opened for signature at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and rests on three objectives: the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from genetic resources. Its governing body is the Conference of the Parties, which meets every two years; two protocols sit under it, the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety and the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing. COP15 was the meeting that had to replace the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, agreed at Nagoya in 2010 for the decade to 2020 and substantially missed. What emerged was the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, with four long-term goals to 2050 and twenty-three targets to 2030, of which the best known is the commitment to conserve thirty per cent of terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas by 2030 — the '30 by 30' target — alongside the restoration of thirty per cent of degraded ecosystems, a tenfold reduction in the extinction rate of threatened species by 2050, the halving of food waste, the protection of indigenous peoples' rights and traditional knowledge, and the first stand-alone gender target in the history of the Rio conventions. Because 'COP' names the governing body of any convention, the same abbreviation attaches to the climate convention and to the desertification convention as well, each with its own numbering.

This question hides a genuine ambiguity that is worth naming, because it will recur. 'UN COP 15' by itself does not identify a conference: the fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the climate convention met at Copenhagen in 2009, and the fifteenth to the desertification convention met at Abidjan in 2022. What fixes the reference here is statement A, which speaks of a global biodiversity agreement, and that points unambiguously to the Convention on Biological Diversity. Reading the statements to disambiguate the stem, rather than guessing at the stem in isolation, is the skill this item rewards. The second skill is the one the option set makes decisive: statements B and C name different countries for the same presidency, so exactly one of them can appear in the answer, and since B appears in three options and C in one, establishing which is true resolves the whole question. MPSC's environment questions cluster around the big multilateral agreements — the biodiversity convention, the climate convention and its Paris Agreement, the Ramsar Convention on wetlands, CITES and the Montreal Protocol — and carrying their year, their host city and their headline targets covers most of what is asked. Note that the paper calls the conference a 'Council' and that the English stem ends without a question mark; both are printing features, not clues.

• COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity met at Montreal, Canada from 7 to 19 December 2022 and adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which replaced the Aichi Biodiversity Targets of 2010.
• China held the presidency of COP15 throughout, having hosted the first and largely virtual part of the conference from Kunming in 2021, and asked Canada to host the resumed session because of its zero-COVID restrictions — which is why the framework carries both city names.
• The framework sets four goals to 2050 and twenty-three targets to 2030, including the conservation of thirty per cent of land and sea areas by 2030 and the restoration of thirty per cent of degraded ecosystems.
• It commits parties to reduce the rate of human-induced extinction of threatened species tenfold by 2050, to halve global food waste, and to address the interaction between biodiversity loss and climate change.
• The Convention on Biological Diversity dates from the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, has three objectives — conservation, sustainable use and equitable benefit sharing — and carries the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety and the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing.

• Reading 'COP 15' as a single identifiable meeting, when the climate, biodiversity and desertification conventions each number their conferences separately
• Confusing the presidency of a Conference of the Parties with the country that hosts the venue, which came apart at COP15 with China presiding and Canada hosting
• Admitting two statements that assign the same presidency to different countries, when at most one of them can be true — the false one appears in three of the four options here, so settling it answers the whole question
• Assuming the United States leads any major environmental negotiation, when it is not even a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity

Environment questions in MPSC papers turn heavily on international agreements, and the recurring shapes are the year and city of a conference, the name of the agreement it produced, the headline numerical target, and which country presided or hosted. The statement-combination form used here is favoured when the examiner wants to test several of these at once, and the false statement is usually built by swapping a country, a year or a number. Because the conventions all use the same 'COP' label, an examiner can also trade on the ambiguity between them, so it is worth carrying the numbering of each convention separately along with its most recent meetings. The Kunming-Montreal framework in particular can be examined from many directions — its targets, its relation to the failed Aichi targets, its finance provisions, its gender target — and it connects naturally to domestic questions on India's protected area network and on the Biological Diversity Act.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted at the fifteenth Conference of the Parties to which convention ?

  • (a)The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
  • (b)The Convention on Biological Diversity
  • (c)The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
  • (d)The Ramsar Convention on Wetlands

  Answer(b) The Convention on Biological Diversity — its fifteenth Conference of the Parties met at Montreal in December 2022 under the presidency of China and adopted the framework, which replaced the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. The abbreviation COP attaches to the governing body of every such convention, so a COP15 exists for the climate convention and for the desertification convention too, and the number alone never identifies a meeting.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The '30 by 30' target of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework commits the parties to

  • (a)reduce greenhouse gas emissions by thirty per cent by 2030
  • (b)conserve thirty per cent of terrestrial and marine areas by 2030
  • (c)increase forest cover by thirty per cent by 2030
  • (d)restore thirty per cent of the world's wetlands by 2030

  Answer(b) Conserve thirty per cent of terrestrial and marine areas by 2030 — the target covers terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas, and sits alongside a commitment to restore thirty per cent of degraded ecosystems by the same year. Emission reduction targets belong to the climate convention and its Paris Agreement rather than to the biodiversity framework, which is the confusion the first option is built on.