We must restore nature to avoid global catastrophe, warns biodiversity summit president

Susana Muhamad is Colombia’s environment minister and will preside over the biodiversity Cop16 conference in Cali. Photograph: Raúl Arboleda/AFP/Getty Images

Humanity risks catastrophic global heating if it focuses only on decarbonisation at the expense of restoring the natural world, Colombia’s environment minister has said in the lead-up to the world’s key nature summit later this year.

Susana Muhamad, who will be president of the UN biodiversity Cop16 summit in Cali in October, said that a singular focus on cutting carbon emissions while failing to restore and protect natural ecosystems would be “dangerous for humanity” and risk societal collapse.

While laying out her vision for the meeting during a press briefing in Montreal, Canada, Muhamad said a main focus would be to raise political awareness for the natural world to keep humanity in safe planetary limits.

“There is a double movement humanity must make. The first one is to decarbonise and have a just energy transition,” Muhamad said. “The other side of the coin is to restore nature and allow nature to take again its power over planet Earth so that we can really stabilise the climate.

“The climate has much more awareness and political investment, but we are not seeing the other side of the coin, and it’s dangerous. That is dangerous for humanity. One of the main purposes for Cop16 in Cali is to make biodiversity and the global biodiversity framework as politically relevant as the climate agenda,” she added.

While the nature crisis has risen up the global political agenda, with a 2022 UN agreement to halt the loss of biodiversity by the end of the decade, thenature summits – which take place every two years – do not enjoy the same attention from governments and world leaders as meetings about the climate, which are attended by tens of thousands of delegates every year.

Ahead of talks, Muhamad urged governments from the global north to make good on their commitments to increase funding for nature restoration, adding that Cop16 would focus on how to mobilise alternative sources of finance from the private sector.

She called for countries to “make a gesture to increase trust in the conference and actually put their money in the global biodiversity fund that we approved in Montreal [at Cop15 in 2022]. It would be a sign that we are committed”.

The Colombian government has been a leading voice at for action at international environmental summits in recent years under the presidency of the country’s first leftwing leader Gustavo Petro, and became the first major fossil fuel producer to join an alliance of nations calling for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai last year.