The UN conference on biodiversity ended in stalemate

The major United Nations conference on biodiversity concluded on Saturday in Cali, Colombia, without achieving the objective of financing and stimulating humanity’s efforts against the destruction of different natural species, foreshadowing similar difficulties in Cop on climate to be held in Baku in about ten days.

The Colombian presidency of COP16 failed to get participants to agree on funding to be allocated to the protection of biodiversity despite the negotiations continuing until the end, even at night. After 10 hours of late-night discussions and some victories achieved, the quorum was no longer full, too many delegates had gone to sleep or had to catch flights home. “Of course this makes the potential” of the U.N. process weaker and slower, said Susana Muhamad, the Colombian environment minister who chaired the conference, from the podium where she congratulated her teams. The formal closure of COP16 is therefore postponed to a later date, explained David Ainsworth, spokesperson for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

The largest COP on biodiversity, with a record attendance of 23,000 participants, had a central mission: to stimulate the timid application of the Kunming-Montreal Agreementsigned two years ago to save the planet and living beings from deforestation, excessive exploitation of resources and climate change due to pollution. The 2022 agreement calls for establishing protected areas on 30% of land and seas, in addition to 22 other goals set for 2030. To achieve them, the agreement calls for increasing annual spending to $200 billion; developed countries have committed to providing $30 billion by 2030 (up from about $15 billion in 2022, according to the OECD). But after 12 days of the summit, neither the rich countries, led in Cali by the European Union, Japan and Canada, nor the developing ones, Brazil and the African group in the lead, have accepted the others’ proposals.

Today, the Colombian presidency noted the impasse and suspended the conference. However, this financial battle between the North and South of the world will have to resume on 11 November, in the other COP, the one on climate, scheduled in Azerbaijan. In this case the amounts will be ten times higher. “This negative signal will have repercussions on the other environmental negotiations at the end of the year (climate, plastic, desertification), because it highlights a profound disagreement on the very possibility, political and technical, of carrying out North-South transfers in a completely different way”, analyzes Sèbastien Treyer, of the Iddri research center.