Less known than its “big sister” for the climate, the COP on biodiversity has generated growing enthusiasm since its previous edition, chaired by China and held in Montreal, Canada, in 2022. The meeting ended with the historic agreement of Kunning-Montreal, an unprecedented global commitment to halt and reverse global biodiversity loss by 2030, endorsed by 193 countries.
The challenge now is to make the agreement and the goal of preserving 30% of the planet’s biodiversity by 2030 take off. To do this, they are in Colombiaat the “peace with nature” COP, as it was called, negotiators and representatives from 196 member countries (excluding the United States) of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
After Montreal, each member country had to translate commitments into a national strategy. That is, establish their own objectives to reduce the destruction of biodiversity, in the same way they do to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. These two weeks of negotiations will be an opportunity to provide a first update on progress.
At the moment, in two years, only 32 of the 196 states have updated their biodiversity strategy since COP15. Furthermore, only 100 delivered their “national targets”, including several who did so only in the last few days.
On the other hand, new countries joined the group, such as Libya or Palestinewho set their goals for the first time. “This explosion of mobilization is a positive sign. Obviously we will have to look at the content of these national goals, but this shows the effects of the Kunming-Montreal Global Framework at the national level, on the eve of a negotiation where important issues still need to be negotiated”, comments Juliette Landry, researcher in biodiversity governance at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations.
COP16 should serve as a springboard to further accelerate this movement. The meeting will also be the opportunity to begin checking the progress of declared strategies and the effectiveness of monitoring methods for the protection of living beings. An official assessment of the state of ambitions will take place within two years.
In Montreal, the European Union was the driving force behind the global biodiversity agreement. But the bloc arrives in Cali weakened after numerous obstacles to environmental laws, consequences of the European farmers’ movement, at the beginning of 2024.
Financing as a problem for COPs
COP 16 on biodiversity takes place a few weeks before two other fundamental UN conferences on environmental matters: the Climate COP 29, in Azerbaijanand COP 16 on desertification, in Saudi Arabia. Although they have their own political issues to be debated, the three have a common objective: the survival of the human species on an increasingly threatened planet.
“A number of actors realize that COP16 is an important point on the path to COP30 (of the climate, which will happen in Brazil next year),” he told RFI Sébastien Treyer, director of the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations (Iddri). “The COP agendas on biodiversity and climate are converging. We need to think about them together”, for example, in food systems and land use.
The common denominator of these three events is the urgent need for money to achieve the objectives, unanimously defined by the member countries of the three Conventions: climate, biodiversity and desertification.
One of the goals of the agreement was to significantly increase financing to protect and restore nature and determined that financing of US$20 billion per year should be made available by 2025 to developing countries, and US$30 billion annually by 2030.
Maria Angélica Ikeda, chief negotiator of the Brazilian COP 16 delegation, is not optimistic. She states that financing has decreased in Brazil.
“There is an OECD report from this year that shows that, in fact, we are still far from reaching this goal of the developed countries themselves. We are talking about a report prepared in essence, by themselves. They would be in agreement with their accounts. There is something like 23% of the target that they should achieve. But there are other calculations that are being made by other organizations, including civil society, because there is a perception that there may be what we call double accounting”, he explained during a press conference in Brasília.
“This means that what is counted by the OECD are other projects that also end up benefiting biodiversity, but, in fact, they are projects for climate or social development. And this OECD report itself says that, in the bilateral flow from developed countries to developing countries, projects that have biodiversity as their main objective have fallen. And the numbers are well below those 20 billion dollars”, he highlights.
Brazil is one of the most interested parties in the Cali dialogues because it is part of the 17 megadiverse countries on the planet, with around 20% of the total number of species on Earth in its territories.
For André Corrêa do Lago, secretary for Climate, Energy and Environment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and head of the Brazilian delegation at COP16, there is a fragmentation of the financial discussion, which even makes it difficult to measure how many resources are available and also access to these resources.
He explained during a press conference in Brasília that several financial mechanisms are created or reinforced to protect the forests that shelter most of the Planet’s biodiversity. In this sense, Brazil sought to join forces with Latin American countries to demand that developed nations respect their commitments in terms of resources.
“Brazil, which among the tropical countries has the best science, the best academia, the best institutions, in a certain way, must take the best possible information to the other tropical countries so that we can have an international positioning, whether from the countries that need it receive the resources and not the traditional perspective that the resources come with the logic of the countries that provide the resources”, he says.
Colombia wants to leave its mark
The Colombian Environment Minister, president of COP16, wants to go beyond negotiations and insisted on the need for a “conceptual change in values”. According to Susana Muhamad, this conference “is not just a question of implementing regulatory mechanisms”, but “essentially of rethinking our way of life, of rethinking the development model, of rediscovering how we live together in diversity, in a system that does not make nature a victim of development”.
The country has placed the inclusion of indigenous and traditional communities at the center of its agenda. COP16 will be an opportunity to finalize a new program with the aim of including traditional knowledge in national conservation plans and decisions.
Negotiators will also discuss the creation of a permanent body on indigenous issues to ensure representation of these groups at the conference.
Colombia is a dynamic player at climate conferences. Its biodiversity is exceptional, with one in every ten terrestrial species in the world, according to WWF, or more than 56 thousand.
But Colombia’s wealth also generates problems such as the predation of its subsoil, rich in oil and minerals, and violence against environmental activists, 79 of whom were killed in 2023 in the country, the most dangerous in the world for environmentalists.
Another challenge for the country hosting the event is security. Cali was placed on alert under threat from the guerrillas, who promised that the event would be a “fiasco”.
Around 11,000 Colombian police and soldiers, supported by security personnel from the UN and the United States, are reinforcing security in the city, where 140 ministers and 12 heads of state are expected.
