The COP16 biodiversity summit was a big flop for protecting nature

Biodiversity loss is a crisis – and it is now clearer than ever that the world is not moving fast enough to fix it. The COP16 summit in Cali, Colombia, fizzled out in overtime last weekend, with too few countries still in attendance to agree on a global plan to halt the decline of nature.

“Unfortunately, too many countries and UN officials came to Cali without the urgency and level of ambition needed to secure outcomes at COP16 to address our species’ most urgent existential issue,” says Brian O’Donnell at the Campaign for Nature, an environmental advocacy group.

Signs that progress was lacking were clear from the outset of the meeting, with nearly all countries missing a deadline to submit official plans on how they will achieve the ambitious biodiversity targets set two years ago at COP15, including protecting 30 per cent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. A few more of these plans trickled in during the two weeks of the summit, including those from large countries like India and Argentina, but most countries’ strategies are still missing.

Going into COP16, it was clear the world is not on track to hit those targets. Since 2020, the area of the planet’s land and oceans under formal protections has increased just 0.5 per cent, according to a UN report released during the summit. That is a rate far too slow to protect 30 per cent of the planet by the end of the decade.

And those protections are sorely needed. A report from the Zoological Society of London and the World Wildlife Fund, released ahead of the summit, found an average 73 per cent decline in the size of vertebrate animal populations since 1970, an increase of 4 percentage points since 2022. Another stark report, which the International Union for the Conservation of Nature released at the meeting, found 38 per cent of the world’s tree species are threatened with extinction.

Many lower-income countries said their failure to develop and submit plans by the deadline, let alone to begin carrying them out, was due to a dearth of financial resources. COP16 did see higher-income countries make pledges – totalling about $400 million – to help these efforts, but funds remain billions short of the $20 billion annual goal promised by 2025.

A clear plan to close this finance gap, as well as monitor progress towards the targets, was left unresolved as the talks ran into overtime early Saturday morning. As delegates left, the number of countries in attendance dwindled below the minimum number required to make decisions, and the meeting was suspended without reaching a resolution. The agenda will be taken up at an interim meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2025.

“Nature is on life support and by not reaching a strong financial compromise here in Cali, the risk of its collapse increases,” says Patricia Zurita at Conservation International, a non-profit environmental organisation.

Although COP16’s failure to move the needle on finance disappointed observers, the meeting did manage one key agreement: a deal on how to collect revenue from products developed using the planet’s genetic data. Before the meeting was suspended, countries agreed to urge pharmaceutical and other biotech companies that use such “digital sequence information” to contribute 0.1 per cent of revenue or 1 per cent of profits to a “Cali Fund”. This fund will be used to protect the biodiversity that is the source of such genetic data.

The deal, which comes after nearly a decade of negotiations, was less sweeping than the African Union and some lower-income countries had hoped, and the fact that it is voluntary means much will depend on how individual countries and companies respond. But UN estimates suggest the fund could raise up to a billion dollars a year for biodiversity. “It might raise some, but at nowhere near the scale or speed required,” says Pierre du Plessis, a long-time negotiator for the African Union. Ahead of the meeting, he argued in New Scientist that the fund should be much larger.

Indigenous people also saw a victory before the meeting was suspended, with the creation of a formal body that will give them a stronger voice in biodiversity negotiations.

But the overall mood was dour. “A real shame of COP16 is that [debates on] digital sequence information sucked up the last drops of energy and time,” says Amber Scholz at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Germany.

One reason for the apparent lack of urgency is that the world treats climate change and biodiversity loss as two separate issues. The annual global climate summits are better attended and receive far more attention than the biodiversity negotiation – only six heads of state attended COP16, compared with the 154 who went to last year’s climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. That is a problem when the two issues are intertwined: climate change is one of the main threats to biodiversity, and the most biodiverse ecosystems are often also the best at storing carbon.

“I think the most important thing we need is to change what has been the permanent neglect of biodiversity, especially when compared to climate change,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said at the summit. “They are all interlinked and indivisible.”