Nearly 200 countries gather at COP16 to discuss meeting 2022 treaty pledges

Environmental leaders from nearly 200 countries are gathering in Colombia to assess historic commitments to halt and reverse the loss of nature.

The two-week United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP16) starting on Monday is a follow-up to the 2022 Montreal meetings where 196 countries signed an ambitious global treaty, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, to protect biodiversity.

Delegates in Cali will debate how they can save nature from the current rapid rate of destruction and how they will live up to the 2022 accord’s demands.

These include countries setting 30 percent of their territories aside for conservation, slashing subsidies for businesses that harm nature and mandating that companies report their environmental effect.

Countries were expected to submit their biodiversity plans, known as NBSAPs, by the start of the summit that runs till November 1. As of Friday, 31 out of 195 countries had filed a plan to the UN biodiversity secretariat.

On Sunday, Colombia’s Environment Minister and COP16 President Susana Muhamad described the conference as an opportunity “to collect the experience that has passed through this planet from all civilisations, from all cultures, from all knowledge … to generate livable, relatively stable conditions for a new society that will be forged in the light of the crisis.”

COP16 agenda

Wealthy nations agreed at 2022’s COP15 to contribute at least $20bn annually starting in 2025 towards helping developing countries meet their nature goals, with the target rising to $30bn by 2030.

By 2022, $15.4bn had been raised, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

“We have a problem here,” Gavin Edwards, director of the nonprofit Nature Positive, told the Reuters news agency.

“COP16 is an opportunity to re-energise and remind everybody of their commitments two years ago and start to course correct if we’re going to get anywhere close to 2030 targets being achieved,” Edwards said.

UN chief Antonio Guterres on Sunday appealed for “significant investment” in the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund that was set up in 2022.

“We must leave Cali with … commitments to mobilise other sources of public and private finance,” the secretary-general said in a video played to COP16 delegates.

So far, countries have made about $250m in commitments to the fund, according to agencies monitoring progress.

Leaders at the world’s biggest nature protection conference will also be looking at ways to simultaneously address climate change issues and biodiversity decline.

The rate of nature destruction through activities like logging or overfishing has not let up, while governments miss deadlines on their biodiversity action plans, and funding for conservation is billions of dollars away from meeting a 2025 goal.

Muhamad, part of Colombia’s first-ever left-wing government, told local media that one of the conference’s main objectives is to make clear that “biodiversity is as important, complementary and indispensable as the energy transition and decarbonisation.”

Colombian Indigenous people of different ethnicities participate in the opening of the 16th United Nations Biodiversity Summit in Cali, Colombia, October 20, 2024 [File: Luisa Gonzalez/Reuters]

The summit aims to establish a global multilateral system for paying for access to data on genetic information taken from plants, animals and microbes, called digital sequence information.

Additionally, COP16 will look to finalise a new programme for including traditional knowledge in national conservation plans and decisions.

The UN office for the Convention on Biological Diversity – which oversees the implementation of the original 1992 nature pact – has called for special protections to be given to Indigenous groups in voluntary isolation, stressing these communities’ role in protecting nature.

Indigenous populations are well represented at biodiversity COPs but often emerge the most disappointed by final decisions.

This year, they intend to use the summit taking place on the edge of the Amazon to have their rights and ancestral knowledge recognised, after years of marginalisation and forced displacement.

“A lot of discourse has been given about the voices of local communities … Indigenous peoples really playing a key role,” Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch, an organisation that protects the rainforest, told The Associated Press news agency. “So that’s one of the things that we’ll be looking for at COP16.”

In Colombia’s capital, Bogota, the region’s Indigenous people have been preparing for months for COP16, said the head of one organisation.

“This is a great opportunity to make the impact that we need to demonstrate to all the actors that come from other countries the importance of Indigenous peoples for the world,” said Jose Mendez, secretary of the National Organization of Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon.