COP16 biodiversity summit was a huge failure for conservation

Biodiversity loss is a crisis. And it’s clearer than ever that the world isn’t moving fast enough to solve it. Last weekend’s COP16 summit in Cali, Colombia, collapsed in overtime, with too few countries present to agree on a global plan to halt the decline of nature.

“Unfortunately, too many countries and UN officials are working together without the level of urgency and ambition needed to secure an outcome at COP16 to address our species’ most pressing survival issues. has come to Cali,” said Brian O’Donnell of the environmental advocacy group Campaign for Nature. group.

Signs of the lack of progress were evident from the start of the meeting, with almost all countries demonstrating how far they have reached the ambitious biodiversity targets set at COP15 two years ago, including protecting 30 percent of the earth’s land. The deadline to submit a formal plan on how to achieve this was missed. Several more plans were brought forward during the two weeks of the summit, including plans from big countries like India and Argentina, but most countries’ strategies have not yet been developed.

As COP16 began, it was clear that the world was not on track to achieve these goals. Since 2020, the area of ​​Earth’s land and oceans under formal protection has increased by just 0.5%, according to a UN report released during the summit. This is too slow a rate to protect 30 percent of the planet by the end of the decade.

And their protection is desperately needed. A report by Zoological Society of London and the World Wildlife Fund released ahead of the summit found that vertebrate populations have declined by an average of 73% since 1970, and have increased by 4 percentage points since 2022. In another damning report, the International Union for Conservation of Nature presented a report at a conference that found that 38 percent of the world’s tree species are at risk of extinction.

Many low-income countries said a lack of financial resources prevented them from developing and submitting plans on time, let alone starting implementation. At COP16, high-income countries pledged a total of around $400 million to support these efforts, but funding remains billions of dollars short of the annual goal of $20 billion pledged by 2025. .

Negotiations went into overtime early Saturday morning, with no clear plan to close the funding gap and monitor progress towards the goal left unresolved. As delegates left the room, the number of countries present fell below the minimum required for decision-making, and the meeting was adjourned without reaching a resolution. The topic will be taken up at an interim meeting to be held in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2025.

“Nature is on life support and here in Cali, unless we reach a strong financial compromise, we risk collapse,” said Patricia Zurita of the nonprofit conservation group Conservation International. says.

Although COP16’s failure to change the direction of fiscal issues disappointed observers, one important agreement was reached at the meeting. It’s an agreement on how to collect revenue from products developed using Earth’s genetic data. Before the conference is adjourned, each country will require pharmaceutical and other biotech companies that use such “digital sequence information” to donate 0.1% of their revenue or 1% of their profits to the “Kali Fund” We agreed to ask. This fund will be used to protect the biodiversity that is the source of such genetic data.

The fact that the agreement, which took nearly a decade of negotiations and is voluntary and less comprehensive than the African Union and some low-income countries had hoped, means that individual countries and companies This means that it depends greatly on how you respond to the situation. But the United Nations estimates that the fund could raise up to $1 billion a year for biodiversity. “We may be able to get some, but it’s nowhere near the scale and speed that is required,” said Pierre du Plessis, a longtime African Union negotiator. Ahead of the meeting, he claimed: new scientist The fund should be bigger.

Indigenous peoples also see a victory ahead of the conference’s suspension, with the establishment of formal institutions that will give them a stronger voice in biodiversity negotiations.

However, the overall atmosphere was dark. “The real shame of COP16 is that (debate about) digital sequence information has sucked up every last ounce of energy and time,” said Amber Scholz of Germany’s Leibniz Institute DSMZ.

One reason for the apparent lack of urgency is that the world treats climate change and biodiversity loss as two separate problems. The annual global climate summit attracts far more participants and far more attention than the biodiversity negotiations. While 154 people attended last year’s climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, only six leaders attended COP16. This becomes a problem when the two issues are intertwined. Climate change is one of the main threats to biodiversity, and ecosystems with the highest biodiversity often also have the greatest capacity to store carbon.

“I think the most important thing we need is to change the persistent neglect of biodiversity, especially when compared to climate change,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the summit. mentioned in. “They are all interconnected and cannot be divided.”