Cop16 ends in disarray and indecision despite biodiversity breakthroughs

Conservation summit agrees global levy on drugs from nature’s genetics and stronger indigenous representation, but developing nations furious at unmet funding promises

A global summit on halting the destruction of nature ended in disarray on Saturday, with some breakthroughs but key issues left unresolved.

Governments have been meeting in Cali, Colombia, for the first time since a 2022 deal to stop the human-caused destruction of life on Earth. Countries hoped to make progress during the two-week summit on crucial targets such as protecting 30% of the Earth for nature and reforming parts of the global financial system that damage the environment.

Negotiations were due to finish on Friday evening but ended in confusion on Saturday morning after almost 12 hours of talks. Governments failed to reach a consensus on key issues such as nature funding and how this decade’s targets would be monitored. Many were forced to leave the talks early to catch flights, and negotiations were suspended at 8.30am when fewer than half of the countries were present, and the meeting lost quorum. Countries will need to continue the talks next year at an interim meeting in Bangkok.

A number of countries expressed fury at the way the talks had been dragged out and the order of discussions, which left crucial issues undecided at the final hour.

“We really question the lack of legitimacy of discussing such an important issue at the end of the Cop,” the Brazilian negotiator Maria Angelica Ikeda said, shortly before discussions of resource mobilisation were cut off. “We should have started discussing these issues at the beginning … We should have decisions guaranteeing that we have the resources we need.”

The negotiator for Fiji, Michelle Baleikanacea, emphasised that many developing nations – who did not have budgets to change flight plans – were forced to abandon the meeting. “Unfortunately Fiji is the only remaining Pacific island country present at this Cop – we came as a delegation of 10 and I am the only one left. We cannot afford to be changing flights because we don’t have the funds,” she said.

Governments were able to make some significant breakthroughs: they agreed on a global levy on products made using genetic data from nature, potentially creating one of the world’s largest biodiversity conservation funds; and formally incorporated Indigenous communities in the official decision-making of the UN biodiversity process, in what negotiators described as a “watershed moment” for indigenous representation.

But while the digital sequence information (DSI) fund plan passed at the meeting, it was unclear whether there were enough countries still present to formalise the vote. If not, countries could question the legitimacy of the decision at a later date.

Observers said that despite the agreements, Cop16 fell short of what was needed to halt the crisis in the natural world, warning that many governments and UN officials were not acting with the required urgency. They pointed to a lack of leadership from the EU, China, Canada and others who had played a leading role in helping to reach agreements on this decade’s targets just two years ago.

During the summit, it became clear that many countries were making weak or no progress on crucial aims such as reforming environmentally harmful subsidies, protected areas and even submitting national plans for meeting the targets.

“We saw insufficient leadership from the wealthier countries, the European Union and France in particular, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, the UK, but also China. The executive secretary of the UN convention on biodiversity was also quite phantomatic,” said Oscar Soria, director of thinktank the Common Initiative.

Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature, said too many countries and UN officials came to Cali without the urgency and level of ambition needed. “The world doesn’t have time for business as usual,” he said. “The suspension of the Cop without any agreed-upon finance strategy is alarming.”

“The pace of Cop16 negotiations did not reflect the urgency of the crisis we are facing,” said Catherine Weller, director of global policy at Fauna & Flora.

“Despite the hard-won breakthrough on creating a fund for profits from nature’s genetic information and ongoing rhetoric about the urgency of scaling up finance for nature, there has not been significant headway made on how we will finance nature recovery, nor clarity on how we monitor progress at a global level. Two years on, the vast majority of nature targets agreed in Montreal regrettably currently still feel like unfunded words on paper,” she said.

What countries did – and didn’t – deliver

Agreement to make companies share profits from commercial discoveries derived from nature’s genetics

Genetic data from nature, known as Digital Sequence Information, is playing an increased role in commercial drug and product discoveries. Much of this information has so far been accessed for free on global databases despite generating billions in revenue, infuriating the nature-rich countries from where the data originates. But this is expected to change.

Companies that meet two of three criteria – sales of more than $50m (£39m), profits of more than $5m, and $20m in total assets – will need to contribute 1% of profits or 0.1% of their revenue to the DSI fund.

While the deal is voluntary and national governments will need to introduce the rules domestically, some estimate that the fund could generate more than £1bn a year for nature conservation.

At least half of the money raised will flow to Indigenous communities and a portion will be dedicated to ensuring that developing countries benefit.

“It’s a significant step forward,” said Pierre du Plessis, a veteran former negotiator from Namibia and a DSI expert.

“But I can’t help feeling we have missed a major opportunity to rally around a far more ambitious approach [to finance], which could mobilise resources at the scale urgently required.”

Indigenous and local communities to have a permanent role in biodiversity decision-making

For more than 20 years, Indigenous peoples and local communities have had an informal working group as part of the UN biodiversity process. This has been upgraded into a permanent body – meaning they can contribute to negotiations without being reliant on the goodwill of governments.

This is the first time a UN environment body has made this decision. Jennifer “Jing” Corpuz, a lead negotiator for the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB), called it “watershed moment in the history of multilateral environmental agreements”.

Local communities are defined as groups of people who have a long association with the land or water they live on, and the text includes mention of the rights of afro-descendant people, which refers to people of African descent living in the Americas often as a result of slavery.

No strategy for raising $200bn a year to finance nature conservation

One of Cop16’s priorities was to implement a strategy for raising money to fund nature protection. In 2022, countries had committed to raising $200bn a year by 2030, including $20bn to be given by richer countries to developing countries by 2025. It failed to do so.

Bernadette Fischler Hooper, global advocacy lead at WWF, said the lack of progress was “really disappointing”. She said: “It’s a real anticlimax. I’ve been here for three weeks and it’s kind of ended in a little dust cloud,” she said.

Throughout talks, developing nations raised concerns that wealthy countries were not going to deliver on their $20bn promise, given that the deadline is just two months away. During final discussions, delegates from countries in the global south made impassioned speeches about the limited resources they have to protect biodiversity.

“This Cop has neither delivered that additional funding nor given us confidence that governments will work together to deliver it in a transparent and urgent manner,” said Jiwoh Abdulai, minister of environment and climate change from Sierra Leone. “Governments have shown time and time again that they can materialise the funds needed when they want – be that for pandemics or wars. Why then can they not materialise it to fight the greatest existential threat we face?”

Developing countries – especially the Africa group and Brazil – had demanded a new “finance mechanism” to distribute biodiversity finance. They argue that the current fund – which sits within the Global Environment Facility (GEF) – is too burdensome to access and controlled by wealthy nations. This remains unresolved.

The meeting also ran out of time to approve the Convention on Biological Diversity budget for the next two years.

No plan for how biodiversity targets will be monitored

Governments failed at Cop16 to sign off on how this decade’s targets would be monitored, something that was underscored as a key priority before the summit. After 23 targets and four goals were agreed upon at Cop15 in Montreal two years ago, it remains undecided how progress to meeting them will be officially tracked.

The world has never met a target on halting the destruction of nature, and several vague aims were blamed for a lack of progress on the last decade’s deal. It is understood that most countries are in agreement on the draft monitoring framework for the deal but were unable to sign off on it after they ran out of time while discussing other more divisive topics.

Cover photo: Jhajayra Machoa Mendua, leader of the A'I Cofan nationality, speaks during a press conference at the Cop16 summit Photograph: Luisa González/Reuters