The COP16 biodiversity summit was a big failure for nature protection

Biodiversity loss is a crisis – and it is now clearer than ever that the world is not acting fast enough to fix it. The COP16 summit in Cali, Colombia, ended in overtime last weekend, with too few countries still present to agree on a global plan to halt nature’s decline.

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

The signs of a lack of progress were clear from the start of the meetingwhile almost all countries missed the deadline to submit official plans on how they will meet the ambitious biodiversity targets set two years ago at COP15, including protection 30 percent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. A few other such plans were unveiled during the two-week summit, including those from major countries like India, Russia and Argentina, but most countries’ strategies are still lacking .

As COP16 approached, it was clear that the world was not on track to achieve these goals. Since 2020, the area of ​​the planet’s land and oceans with formal protections has increased by just 0.5%, according to a UN report released at the summit. This is far too slow a pace to protect 30% of the planet by the end of the decade.

And these protections are absolutely necessary. A report A report from the Zoological Society of London and the World Wildlife Fund, released ahead of the summit, found an average decline of 73% in vertebrate animal population sizes since 1970, an increase of 4 percentage points since 2022. reportwhich the International Union for Conservation of Nature released at the meeting, revealed that 38 percent of the planet’s tree species are threatened with extinction.

Many low-income countries said their inability to develop and submit plans on time, let alone begin implementing them, was due to a lack of financial resources. COP16 saw higher-income countries pledge – totaling around $400 million – to support these efforts, but funds remain short of the annual target of $20 billion promised by 2025.

A clear plan to close that financial gap, as well as track progress toward the goals, remained up in the air as negotiations stretched into early Saturday morning. As delegates left, the number of countries present fell below the minimum number required to make decisions, and the meeting was suspended without reaching a resolution. The agenda will be discussed at an interim meeting in Bangkok, Thailand in 2025.

“Nature is on life support and by not reaching a solid financial compromise here in Cali, the risk of its collapse increases,” says Patricia Zurita to Conservation International, a non-profit environmental organization.

Although COP16’s failure to move forward on funding disappointed observers, the meeting nevertheless managed to reach a key agreement: an agreement on how to collect revenue from products developed at the help of the genetic data of the planet. Before the meeting adjourned, countries agreed to urge pharmaceutical and other biotechnology companies that use this “digital sequence information” to contribute 0.1 percent of their revenues or 1 percent of profits to a ” Cali Fund”. This fund will be used to protect the biodiversity that is the source of this genetic data.

The agreement, which comes after nearly a decade of negotiations, was less radical than the African Union and some low-income countries hoped, and the fact that it is voluntary means that much will depend on the reaction of each country and each company. But UN estimates suggest the fund could raise up to $1 billion a year for biodiversity. “It might increase some, but nowhere near the scale or speed required,” says Pierre du Plessis, a longtime negotiator for the African Union. Before the meeting, he argued in New scientist that the fund should be much larger.

Indigenous peoples also experienced a victory before the meeting was suspended, with the creation of a formal body that will give them a a stronger voice in negotiations on biodiversity.

But the general mood was gloomy. “What is really unfortunate about COP16 is that the (debates on) digital sequence information have absorbed the last drops of energy and time,” says Amber Scholz at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Germany.

One reason for this apparent lack of urgency is that the world views climate change and biodiversity loss as two separate problems. The annual global climate summits are busier and receive far more attention than biodiversity negotiations – only six heads of state attended COP16, compared to 154 at last year’s climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. This is a problem when the two problems are linked: climate change is one of the main threats to biodiversity, and the ecosystems richest in biodiversity are often also those which best store carbon.

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