- The COP16 biodiversity summit ended on a mixed note. Delegates from 177 nations agreed to language saying that companies “should” pay conservation fees for genetic digital sequence information (DSI) from which they profit. Corporate lobbyists ensured this measure was voluntary, but tropical nations could build DSI fees into their laws.
- COP16 delegates also agreed to give Indigenous peoples and local communities a place at the negotiating table regarding conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, with “fair and equitable” sharing of benefits.
- Oceans got a boost as a coalition of 11 philanthropies pledged $51.7 million to identify and expand marine protected areas in open oceans. The new Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) also moved toward launch. This novel funding mechanism could offer an estimated $4 billion annually to 70 tropical nations.
- NGOs and large philanthropies identified obstacles that must be cleared to redirect $1.7 trillion in national subsidies that now annually harm biodiversity. On the down side, COP16 utterly missed addressing the failure of wealthy nations to keep financial pledges to protect nature with $20 billion by 2025 and $200 billion by 2030.
CALI, Colombia — The United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP16, ended on Nov. 2. Several days before delegations from 177 nations completed their work, a top finance official offered some stern advice to anyone comparing the biennial biodiversity summits to the U.N.’s parallel annual climate summits (the 29th of which opens a week from now in Baku, Azerbaijan).
“We live in a world where huge climate fatigue is setting in on the climate side,” warned Valerie Hickey, global director for the World Bank’s division on environment, natural resources and oceans. “Important things are being done, but all you hear is that the world is on fire and nothing is working. You can’t rally a constituency around dread and fear.
“On the nature side, if we want to build a coalition not just of the willing but of the working, we have to make the difficult choices and celebrate our successes. We have to rally people around a positive vision for the future because [the] climate [community] hasn’t done well enough in that regard …. The nature community needs to break from that tradition and start talking about what we can do, not just everything that’s wrong.”
This Mongabay summary hits on highlights from Cali — acknowledging both successes and failures. While headway was made at COP16, the summit fell into chaos on Nov. 2 before final decisions could be made on important financial issues — with many delegates from developing nations forced to leave Cali, as they could not afford to change flight plans when the summit blew past its official end time.
As with other UN environmental summits, it was always going to be daunting and impractical for 177 attending national delegations at CO16 to reach consensus in just two weeks on hundreds of complex issues, policies and official language choices. But that’s what was required to approve action-oriented recommendations to halt ongoing forest and species loss on land and sea, to elevate Indigenous rights, and garner the billions in funding needed globally to pull it all off.
The following is a recap of what the delegates at the biodiversity summit did accomplish under the widely acclaimed leadership of COP16 president Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s minister of the environment, and the essential actions still to be done.
The ‘Cali Fund’: Paying a fee for profits from nature
In recent years, science has achieved the cataloging and digitizing of the genetic makeup of a large number of wild plant and animal species. And industrial sectors, ranging from pharmaceuticals to biotech and cosmetics, have plumbed these open-source genetic databases for free, with many firms profiting handsomely from new groundbreaking products.
Take, for example, the digital sequence information, or DSI, from hundreds of respiratory viruses used by Moderna, the U.S. pharma giant, to quickly develop its COVID-19 vaccine, from which it generated $30 billion in sales, and which saved countless lives during the worst global pandemic in more than a century. While investors hugely profited, nature was not paid a dividend.
Pressured by the world’s nations at COP16, corporations like Moderna (which benefit from DSI and which recognize its immense value) agreed in principle at Cali to pay DSI fees — provided those fees are voluntary.
That didn’t sit well with many summit attendees, especially in light of previously unsuccessful voluntary conservation and climate initiatives.
“If you acknowledge the biodiversity crisis as a user of DSI, [and] you acknowledge that you depend on biodiversity for your own organization, [then] you should also agree that protecting that biodiversity takes money,” Georgina Chandler, head of policy for the Zoological Society of London, told Mongabay. “Voluntary contributions simply won’t add up.”
COP16 delegates agreed, approving official language that says companies that profit from biodiversity “should” contribute to a U.N.-controlled fund that will be used to protect nature. The amount: 1% of company profits tied to DSI usage, or 0.1% of revenue (Moderna would have paid $30 million out of $30 billion in COVID-19 vaccine sales, for example).
It’s estimated this “Cali Fund” could generate as much as $1 billion annually. This sort of mechanism is critical because hardly any conservation funds are self-generating. As much as half of the amount gleaned from DSI fees would go directly to Indigenous peoples, the recognized guardians of biodiverse forests, or be channeled to them through their national governments.
Notably, the approved language does not say “must.” But even so, “should” is stronger than “may,” an option proposed by corporate lobbyists that was ignored by delegates. So DSI technically remains voluntary. However, there are high expectations that the newly-named Cali Fund agreement will lead to tropical nations passing laws that require corporations to pay DSI fees.
Nature’s guardians get a seat at the table
In recent years, a body of scientific evidence has grown demonstrating the connection between Indigenous peoples and local communities and their effective protection of biodiverse forests. At U.N. biodiversity meetings, representatives from both groups show up in large numbers — but to date they have remained on the sidelines of negotiations.
This time around, in an unprecedented action, COP16 delegates approved a program of work that officially invites Indigenous peoples and local communities into the negotiating process for the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity, and for the “fair and equitable” sharing of benefits.
“This landmark step not only reshapes [the U.N.’s] approach to biodiversity and traditional knowledge, but also sets a powerful example for Indigenous peoples to be involved in the climate change conventions and other mechanisms,” said Lakpa Nuri Sherpa, co-chair of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. This decision could reverberate at the COP29 climate summit which runs Nov. 11-29.
Oceans get a modest boost
At the last biodiversity summit, COP15 in Montreal in 2022, delegates approved the historic Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which calls for the protection of 30% of natural lands and 30% of oceans by 2030 — dubbed “30 by 30.” But to date, just 8.4% of oceans are in protected areas, and progress towards the 30% target has slowed substantially over the past five years, according to Pepe Clark from WWF.
Until the final few days of this year’s meeting, progress toward action plans to conserve more open seas — where 90% of global marine fish stocks are degraded and overfished — was scant. But on Oct. 28, a coalition of 11 philanthropies pledged $51.7 million to help identify and expand marine protected areas in open oceans. It’s far from enough, say analysts. But most conservation targets under Kunming-Montreal remain entirely unfunded.
The High Seas Treaty, adopted last year, lays out the international governance by which new marine protected areas will be identified. At COP16, nations agreed to update the process of identifying ecologically and biologically significant marine areas for conservation, in part to help advance scientific research.
“COP16 delivered mixed results for the ocean. Countries adopted two important ocean-related technical decisions, but failed to reach consensus on the resource mobilization and review mechanisms needed to drive progress for the ocean across the Global Biodiversity Framework,” Clark told Mongabay, “If countries reconvene as expected in 2025 to address these outstanding issues, they must come prepared to deliver on their promises. We have no time to waste.”
Redirecting ‘perverse subsidies’ that damage nature
Funding for conservation remains scant, in part because of the failure by the world’s wealthiest nations to make good on their funding pledges. As much as $700 billion is said to be needed, but current funding is only about 15% of that.
A major component of the Kunming-Montreal agreement, known as Target 18, aims to help remedy that problem. It calls for redirecting some $1.7 trillion in “perverse subsidies” and tax breaks that support companies and activities that worsen the biodiversity and climate crises. For example, $640 billion in international subsidies support the fossil fuel industry, by far the greatest driver of global warming and environmental harm.
Patricia Zurita, chief strategy officer with Conservation International, told Mongabay that discussions on Target 18, with a goal of redirecting $500 billion in adverse government subsidies next year toward conservation, got a frustratingly late start.
But in a daylong conference outside COP16, key stakeholders such as NGOs and large philanthropies identified obstacles that must be cleared by nations to redirect subsidies and they developed recommendations for how to do so.
“We got started,” Zurita said, “and these discussions will continue beyond [COP16].”
On finance: Falling short, far short
The news from nature’s frontline is largely bad, according to the NGO Campaign for Nature: One-third of tree species face extinction; deforestation, especially across the global tropics, is increasing annually. Likewise, continued biodiversity loss raises the risk of increased global pandemics.
Effectively addressing these crises requires substantial funding, but here COP16 saw its biggest failing. Finance remained among unfinished business as the closing gavel fell, and as delegates rushed to the Cali airport.
The implementation of the 22 biodiversity targets set out in Kunming-Montreal in 2022 was predicated upon wealthy nations contributing $20 billion to developing countries by 2025, with a total of $200 billion to be collected for global distribution by 2030.
Neither goal is close to being met. But discussions on how to get there never got started at COP16. Negotiations on finance are supposed to start again in less than a year in Bangkok, according to the U.N. But the disappointment in Cali was intense.
A delegate from Grenada said angrily: “To the Global North, your inaction is crippling us. You are putting us on a path to extinction. We implore you to adhere to your promises.”
“The pace of COP16 negotiations did not reflect the urgency of the crisis we are facing,” said Catherine Weller, director of global policy for the NGO Fauna & Flora. “Negotiators left some of the most critical issues until last and inevitably ran out of time — but sadly stopping the clock on negotiations won’t do the same for nature loss.”
One finance bright spot was the emergence of the new and novel Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF). The planned fund intends to raise $125 billion in investment capital from wealthy nations and private institutions next year. Like a lending bank, the independently managed TFFF will repay wealthy investors while providing an estimated $4 billion annually to pay to 70 tropical countries to keep their intact biodiverse forests standing.
Some critics argue the fund, which intends to be operational when the COP30 climate summit opens in Brazil in November 2025, will pay too little to most nations to make a difference, while levying significant penalties against tropical nations if deforestation increases.
Most of the reaction, however, was a mixture of enthusiasm and relief, because the TFFF will generate its own income rather than depend on rarely forthcoming annual national donations.
The youth are impatient
Camila Paz Romero, 27, a Quechuan Indigenous tribal member from Chile and a passionate environmental activist, paid her own way to COP16. The airfare, lodging and meals were a major financial hardship for her. But she told Mongabay why she had to be in Cali: It’s her generation who is inheriting an ailing planet in need of life support.
She sees no choice but to speak out to those who literally control her and her generation’s fate, and urge them to act. Now.
“Young people have more visibility at meetings like these,” Paz Romero said. “That’s good. But the parties and states don’t listen to us. Even in our own countries.” Besides COP16, Paz Romero also attended the last two climate summits: COP28 in the UAE and COP29 in Egypt.
“We come because we need to be included. We are walking a long path. In the Global South, we face so many difficult realities — social, economic, environmental. It’s our future that’s at stake. So we will come to these meetings. We will keep raising our voices. And we will demand to be heard.”
Banner image: The motto of COP16, the U.N. biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia, was “Paz con la Naturaleza” — “Peace with Nature.” It’s a goal toward which humanity has a long way to strive. Image by Politécnico Grancolombiano Departamento de Comunicaciones via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).
Justin Catanoso, a regular contributor, is a professor of journalism at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. His COP16 reporting is supported by the Sabin Center for Environment and Sustainability at his university.
Global biodiversity financiers strategize at COP16 to end ‘perverse subsidies’
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