COP16 Biodiversity Summit turns out to be a big failure for nature protection

Biodiversity loss is a crisis, and it is clear now more than ever that the world is not moving fast enough to turn it around. The COP16 summit in Cali, Colombia, collapsed over the weekend due to overtime as too few countries were still present to agree on a global plan to halt environmental decline.

“Unfortunately, too many countries and UN officials came to Cali without the urgency and level of ambition needed to deliver results at COP16 to address our species’ most pressing existential challenge,” says Brian O’Donnell at the Campaign for Nature, an environmental advocacy group.

Signs of a lack of progress were clear from the start of the meeting, with almost all countries missing formal plans to meet the ambitious biodiversity targets set two years ago at COP15, including protecting 30 percent of the planet’s land mass. and oceans by 2030. Several more such plans have emerged over the two weeks of the summit, including plans from major countries such as India and Argentina, but most countries’ strategies are still missing.

In the lead-up to COP16, it became clear that the world was not on track to achieve these goals. The area of ​​the planet’s land and oceans under official protection has increased by just 0.5 percent since 2020, according to a UN report released during the summit. This is too slow a pace to protect 30 percent of the planet by the end of the decade.

And this protection is extremely necessary. A report Data from the Zoological Society of London and the World Wildlife Fund, released ahead of the summit, showed that vertebrate populations have fallen by an average of 73 percent since 1970, up 4 percentage points from 2022. reportA study released by the International Union for Conservation of Nature at the meeting found that 38 percent of the world’s tree species are at risk of extinction.

Many low-income countries said their failure to develop and submit plans by the deadline, let alone begin implementing them, was due to a lack of financial resources. At COP16, higher-income countries made pledges—totaling about $400 million—to help the effort, but funds remain billions of dollars short of the $20 billion annual goal promised by 2025.

A clear plan to close that financial gap, as well as monitor progress toward its goals, remained unresolved as negotiations dragged on early Saturday. When the delegates left, the number of countries present fell below the minimum number required to make decisions, and the meeting was suspended without a resolution being adopted. The agenda will be considered at an interim meeting in Bangkok, Thailand in 2025.

“Nature is on life support, and since a strong financial compromise has not been achieved here in Cali, the risk of its collapse increases,” says Patricia Zurita at Conservation International, a non-profit environmental organization.

While COP16’s failure to change the funding landscape disappointed observers, the meeting did reach one key agreement: agreement on how to generate revenue from products developed using the planet’s genetic data. Before the meeting adjourned, the countries agreed to encourage pharmaceutical and other biotech companies that use such “digital sequence information” to contribute 0.1 percent of revenues or 1 percent of profits to the “Cali Fund.” This fund will be used to protect the biodiversity that is the source of such genetic data.

The agreement, reached after nearly a decade of negotiations, was smaller than the African Union and some low-income countries had hoped, and the fact that it is voluntary means much will depend on how individual countries and companies respond. But the UN estimates the fund could raise up to a billion dollars a year for biodiversity. “Something might work out, but not at the scale and pace that is needed,” says Pierre du Plessis, a longtime African Union negotiator. On the eve of the meeting, he expressed the opinion New scientist that the fund should be much larger.

Indigenous people also scored a victory before the meeting was suspended by creating a formal body that would give them a stronger voice in biodiversity negotiations.

But the general mood was gloomy. “The real shame of COP16 is that (the debate over) digital sequence information has sucked up the last drops of energy and time,” says Amber Scholtz at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Germany.

One reason for the apparent lack of urgency is that the world views climate change and biodiversity loss as two separate problems. The annual global climate summits are better attended and receive far more attention than the biodiversity talks, with only six heads of state attending COP16, compared with the 154 who attended last year’s climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It’s a problem when the two are intertwined: climate change is one of the main threats to biodiversity, and the ecosystems with the most biodiversity are often also the best at storing carbon.

“I think the most important thing we need is to change what has been a persistent neglect of biodiversity, especially compared to climate change,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the summit. “They are all interconnected and indivisible.”

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