UN talks on saving nature stumble on finance hurdle

CALI, Colombia: 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 (CBD) 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 AFP 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 AFP after declaring the Cali COP closed.

The conference, the biggest meeting of its kind yet with around 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 percent of land and sea areas under protection and 30 percent 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 (OECD).

On top of that, nations have pledged about $400 million to a Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) 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.