Colombia is one of just a few “megadiverse” countries, containing within its borders around 10 per cent of all species on Earth. That makes it a potent setting for the world to debate how to stem the rapid pace of biodiversity loss at the COP16 biodiversity summit, happening over the next two weeks. Here is what you need to know about the summit.
What is COP16?
The summit is the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, the treaty that deals with issues related to biodiversity and conservation of nature. The biennial meeting is being held in the city of Cali, Colombia, between 21 October and 1 November, with a theme of “Peace with Nature”. It is the main forum for countries to debate the actions needed to protect the planet’s richness of species, as well as how to share the benefits that biodiversity provides the world.
More than 20,000 delegates from nearly all the world’s countries are registered to attend, making it the largest such conference ever held.
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What are the key issues countries will debate at the summit?
The summit comes two years after countries adopted a landmark set of biodiversity targets during the COP15 meeting in Montreal, Canada. This “Global Biodiversity Framework” defined countries agreed to achieve by 2030. These include a “30 by 30” goal to establish formal protections for 30 per cent of land and oceans, and to restore 30 per cent of all degraded ecosystems. In a shift, many of these targets explicitly recognised the role of Indigenous people and local communities in achieving those goals.
In Cali, countries are expected to offer more detailed targets and plans for how they will achieve these goals within their own borders. These are meant to report on specific policies and actions governments are taking to make progress, from new protected areas to reducing pollution. “We’re really hoping to see whether countries are willing to step up,” says at The Nature Conservancy, a non-profit organisation focused on conservation.
Other issues will include debate about how to fairly share the benefits of the genetic data from the world’s plants, animals and microbes that undergird industries from pharmaceuticals to agriculture. A related question under discussion is what role new biotechnologies, such as “de-extinction” technology and gene drives, have to play in conservation. Such technologies hold promise to help slow biodiversity loss – gene drives might be useful to help control invasive species, for instance – but they also come with significant and poorly understood risks.
Many environmental advocates are also pushing for countries to more closely link action on biodiversity and climate change ahead of the COP29 climate summit just two weeks later. The convention may also adopt an action plan proposed in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic to address links between biodiversity loss and health, such as growing risks of pathogens from wildlife spilling over into humans.
Have countries made progress on stopping biodiversity loss since the COP15 summit in 2022?
Determining this is the purpose of the plans and reports countries are meant to submit before the summit. But these are already behind schedule. More than 85 per cent of countries missed a deadline to submit their plans ahead of the meeting, according to a by Carbon Brief. This will make it harder to judge whether countries are making progress on meeting those targets. But the track record isn’t good: the world did not achieve any of the previous biodiversity targets set for 2020.
Targets for which there are progress updates appear not to have budged much. For instance, the area of the ocean under some form of protection has increased only 0.5 per cent since COP15, according to a by the Marine Conservation Institute and other environmental non-profit organisations. At that rate, less than 10 per cent of the ocean would be protected by 2030, far off track of the goal. The quality of protections also varies, according to the analysis, with just 2.8 per cent of the ocean effectively protected.
There are similar concerns on land, including about how much is protected, whether it covers the most important areas for biodiversity, the consequences for Indigenous and local communities and “leakage”, as protections in one place worsen impacts somewhere else. “We’ve got to be careful we don’t just force biodiversity impacts elsewhere,” says at the Stockholm Environment Institute. “The design of the 30 per cent is very important.”
How much money is needed to stem biodiversity loss?
A major part of the negotiations will focus on raising the money needed to achieve all of the above. The Montreal deal estimated $700 billion a year would be needed to achieve the targets. Around $500 billion of that is expected to come from reducing subsidies for activities that harm biodiversity, such as agriculture that drives deforestation. “If you can stop doing bad things, it costs a lot less to do the good things,” says Krueger.
Of the remaining $200 billion, most is expected to come from domestic spending on conservation, says Krueger. The convention has previously set a goal of raising $30 billion by 2030 in annual international financial flows from rich countries to help lower-income countries pursue the targets. Environmental organisations estimate between ˛úľ±±ô±ôľ±´Ç˛ÔĚý˛ą˛Ô»ĺĚý billion per year have been raised toward the goal so far, depending on what is counted as “biodiversity finance”. Either way, fundraising is lagging behind the interim target of $20 billion by 2025.
According to a only three countries – Germany, Sweden and Norway – have contributed their fair share based on GDP. The UK is short by around a billion dollars. The US, which isn’t part of the treaty but contributes funds, is short by about $11 billion.
One new flexible source of funding could come from an agreement being discussed at COP16, which covers how to share the profits generated by genetic data. Countries agreed to do this in Montreal, but they must now hammer out the details in Cali. One proposal is for countries to collect a 1 per cent levy on global retail sales, a step that could on its own fill the annual $200 billion funding gap for biodiversity.
Article amended on 22 October
We corrected the amount of funds raised to meet conservation targets.
