Cop15 is an opportunity to save nature. We can’t afford another decade of failure | Phoebe Weston

Ahead of the UN biodiversity conference, our reporter reflects on lessons of hope and change in three years reporting with the Guardian's age of extinction team

Saying you're a biodiversity reporter doesn't mean much to a lot of people. What do you actually write about?" they ask. And this is exactly why there should be more journalists on this beat. The nature crisis continues to fly under the radar.

In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, there was a wave of enthusiasm about tackling the great environmental problems, and so governments set up three UN conventions to deal with climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification. Since then, the climate crisis has been treated as separate to the biodiversity crisis, yet there is huge overlap between the two.