COP16, UN's Convention on Biological Diversity at Cali, Columbia
The Nepal Weekly 
November 6, 2024
The world’s biggest nature conservation conference closed in Colombia on Saturday with no agreement on a roadmap to ramp up funding for species protection.
With other successes under its belt, the 16th Conference of Parties (COP16) to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity was suspended by its president, Susana Muhamad, as negotiations ran almost 12 hours longer than planned and delegates started leaving to catch flights.
The exodus left the summit without a quorum for decision-making, but CBD spokesman David Ainsworth told media that it will resume at a later date to consider outstanding issues.
“We will continue working because this crisis is too big and we cannot stop,” Muhamad told media after declaring the Cali COP closed.
The conference, the biggest meeting of its kind yet with about 23,000 registered delegates, was tasked with assessing, and ramping up, progress toward reaching 23 targets set in Canada two years ago to halt humankind’s rapacious destruction of nature’s bounty by 2030.
They include placing 30% of land and sea areas under protection and 30% of degraded ecosystems under restoration by 2030, reducing pollution, and phasing out agricultural and other subsidies harmful to nature.
For this purpose, it was agreed in 2022 that $200 billion per year be made available to protect biodiversity by 2030, including the transfer of $30 billion per year from rich to poor nations.
The total for 2022 was about $15 billion, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
On top of that, nations have pledged about $400 million to a Global Biodiversity Framework Fund created last year to meet the UN targets.
In Cali, negotiators were split largely between poor and rich country blocs as they haggled over increased funding and other commitments.
The biggest ask from the summit – to lay out a detailed funding plan – turned out to be a bridge too far.
Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, had offered a draft text proposing the creation of a dedicated biodiversity fund, which was rejected by the European Union, Switzerland and Japan.
Developing nations had insisted on the creation of a new fund, saying they are not adequately represented in existing mechanisms including the GBFF, which they say are also too onerous.
The meeting did manage to coalesce around the creation of a fund to share the profits of digitally sequenced genetic data taken from plants and animals with the communities they come from.
Such data, much of it from species found in poor countries, is notably used in medicines and cosmetics that can make their developers billions, very little of which ever trickles back down.
The Cali agreement determines that genetic data users whose income exceeds a certain threshold should contribute 1% of profits or 0.1% of revenue to the new fund, potentially worth billions of dollars per year.
Delegates also approved the creation of a permanent body to represent the interests of Indigenous people under the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity.
Representatives of Indigenous peoples, many in traditional dress and headgear, broke out in cheers and chants as the agreement was gaveled through.
But the talks on biodiversity funding stumbled even as new research presented to coincide with COP16 showed that more than a quarter of assessed plants and animals are now at risk of extinction.
Only 17.6% of land and inland waters, and 8.4% of the ocean and coastal areas, are estimated to be protected and conserved.
Observers welcomed the summit’s advances on Indigenous representation and gene profit sharing but lamented the funding deadlock.
Minister for Forests and Environment Ain Bahadur Shahi Thakuri has reiterated Nepal’s commitment to bio-diversity conservation.
In the UN Biodiversity Summit known as COP16 which was held in Cali of Colombia, the Minister said Nepal has made remarkable progress in restoration of forest areas and conservation of endangered animals, while the number of tigers has increased three-fold.
Addressing the session ‘Sustainable Finance, Financial System Reform and the Global Response to Biodiversity’, he said Nepal is home to world’s 2.7 per cent biodiversity though it covers just 0.1 per cent of the world’s territory.
Minister Shahi Thakuri said that the achievements were the results of the cooperation of women, indigenous nationalities and local communities, adding that their costs and contributions should not be undermined.
He said that Nepal has garnered 152 million US dollars every year for biodiversity conservation through the community-based conservation initiatives.
“However, this is not sufficient to achieve the goal of our biodiversity perspective. We have a short of 80 million US dollars every year as the financing gap,” the Minister for Forests and Environment said.
To meet this financing gap, we have been implementing different sustainable financing tools, Minister Shahi Thakuri shared.
Likewise, he said that the commitment of the world community to provide 20 billion US dollars every year for biodiversity conservation till 2025 should be implemented.
Minister Shahi also stressed the need for support from the international community for implementing the plans for biodiversity conservation.
COP 16, Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD)
The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), known informally as the Biodiversity Convention, is a multilateral treaty. The Convention has three main goals: the conservation of biological diversity (or biodiversity); the sustainable use of its components; and the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from genetic resources. Its objective is to develop national strategies for the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity, and it is often seen as the key document regarding sustainable development.
The Convention was opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro on 5 June 1992 and entered into force on 29 December 1993. The United States is the only UN member state which has not ratified the Convention. It has two supplementary agreements, the Cartagena Protocol and Nagoya Protocol.
The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity is an international treaty governing the movements of living modified organisms (LMOs) resulting from modern biotechnology from one country to another. It was adopted on 29 January 2000 as a supplementary agreement to the CBD and entered into force on 11 September 2003.
The Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization (ABS) to the Convention on Biological Diversity is another supplementary agreement to the CBD. It provides a transparent legal framework for the effective implementation of one of the three objectives of the CBD: the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources. The Nagoya Protocol was adopted on 29 October 2010 in Nagoya, Japan, and entered into force on 12 October 2014.
