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It was a wild year for the UN Biodiversity Conference, this year known as COP15. The international event brought delegates from more than 190 countries to Montreal to discuss the steps the world needs to take to safeguard its species and ecosystems.

The conference was pushed back for two years due to the pandemic and had originally been slated to take place in Kunming, China. It was eventually moved to Montreal, which hosts the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) office. The conference saw protests from a group of local anti-capitalists , a walkout from countries concerned over funding, and many hours where countries around the globe debated the finer points of how best to preserve biodiversity.

Ultimately, the parties agreed to adopt the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). “The fact that they actually arrived at the agreement is in and of itself really momentous. A couple of weeks ago, that was looking tenuous,” Will Gartshore, senior director for policy and government affairs at WWF-US, told Ars.