UN World Nature Conference started: What should improve

More and more animal species are… extinction threatened, the situation is becoming increasingly dramatic. The “Living Planet Report” from the environmental foundation WWF recently underlined the topicality of the topic. Over the past 50 years, populations of wild mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have declined by around three quarters.

It started on Monday 16th UN Biodiversity Conference (COP16) in Cali, Colombia. The conference runs until November 1st and has the motto “Peace with Nature”. In several meetings, the participants discussed, among other things, the financing of environmental and species protection and the problems that arose when updating and implementing the project. Not an easy plan, according to critics.

Results from last conference

In 2022, COP15 met in Montreal, where a comprehensive nature conservation agreement was agreed upon. The 196 member countries of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) committed to 23 goals to be achieved by 2030. One of them deals with the protection of at least 30 percent the global land and sea areas – since then, 8.2% of the sea has been protected, only 0.5% more than in 2022.

Florian Titze, political scientist and specialist in international politics and multilateral negotiations at WWF Germany, criticized: “We only have five years left until 2030. If we don’t start implementing the promises now, we will probably miss the goals for 2030.”

Financial aspects

Two years ago, member countries agreed to raise $25 billion annually by next year and around $30 billion by 2030 in financial aid for developing countries to protect their nature. Only Sweden and Norway paid their agreed share – 23 out of 28 countries paid less than half.

Astrid Schomaker, head of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, said in an interview with the climate publication Carbon Brief: “We created an ambitious framework just two years ago and now we have to check whether this framework has actually made as much difference as people think.” According to Schomaker, we need to find out whether the goals from two years ago can actually be implemented.

Plans at the current summit

As things currently stand, four major agreements are being discussed and attempted to be implemented this year. They deal with the framework conditions and the review of the 2022 nature conservation agreement, as well as how to review the framework conditions and a multilateral mechanism for fair and equitable benefit sharing among countries.