COP16 comes together for Indigenous Peoples, falls apart on nature funding
By Tina Knezevic and Joshua Ostroff
Two weeks of intense negotiations at the UN biodiversity summit COP16 in Cali, Colombia delivered mixed results, with important progress made to give Indigenous Peoples a permanent seat at the negotiating table, but a frustrating end to talks about conservation funding for developing nations.
As the finance discussion stretched past the scheduled end on Friday night and into Saturday morning, negotiators started leaving to catch flights home and the summit was suspended.
The focus of this year’s meeting was to demonstrate how the international community planned to implement the historic Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), signed in Montreal in 2022, at COP15. The goal of the GBF is to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, but that has proven to a complicated task.
In preparation for the Cali summit, each country was asked to submit a National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP), a roadmap for reaching the GBF’s 23 targets, which includes protecting and restoring a third of the planet’s lands and waters. But only 34 out of 196 countries, including Canada, had done so by the beginning of the meeting.
Another objective for COP16 was to sort out numerous outstanding issues that were deferred from the last negotiations, including funding and Indigenous rights.
The good news: a win for Indigenous Peoples around the world
During the final week of the conference, we hosted a panel discussion about how Indigenous communities in Canada are implementing the GBF through restoration and stewardship of their traditional territories. “We come to these negotiations, and there’s a lot of talk of could and should,” said WWF-Canada president and CEO Megan Leslie during the event. “Well, today, we’re going to shine a light on can and is. The restoration goals of the GBF are possible. We know that because of the work our partners are doing on the ground.”
Just a few days later, COP16 delivered its own can and is with Article 8(j), a decision that Viviana Figueroa, from the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB), called historic because it creates a permanent subsidiary body, led by an Indigenous caucus, that will apply traditional knowledge toward conservation and the sustainable use of biodiversity.
A provisional working group to “recognize the dependency of Indigenous Peoples and local communities on biological diversity and their unique role in conserving life on Earth” was established at the first biodiversity convention in 1992. It was widely seen as insufficient as the guidelines surrounding it were voluntary and it could be disbanded at any time. The move to create a permanent committee addresses those concerns.
“Indigenous Peoples and local communities around the world are celebrating because we will have a space where we can develop a new international law to protect, to promote and conserve this important traditional knowledge, not only for us, but for future generations as well,” Figueroa said in an IIFB statement.
The bad news: No agreements on how to fund nature conservation
COP15’s dramatic late-night approval of the GBF was pushed through with a promise that countries would contribute $200 billion per year from public and private sources by 2030 and that they’d raise $20 billion by next year.
But so far, the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) has collected just $407 million – nearly half of which came from Canada, not including an additional $2 million announced at COP16 from the Government of Quebec, making it the first subnational government to contribute.
The GBFF is administered by the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which is how the UN has distributed funding for developing nations to address biodiversity loss, climate change, pollution, and land and ocean health since 1992. Many developing nations pushed for the creation of a new fund – one that is not managed by GEF, arguing that access to the current fund is cumbersome and overly controlled by rich nations.
The failure to pull together the promised financing plan led WWF’s global advocacy lead, Bernadette Fischler Hooper, to tell The Guardian newspaper that the summit’s conclusion was “a real anticlimax. I’ve been here for three weeks and it’s kind of ended in a little dust cloud.”
The one bright spot is that rather than waiting until COP17 in 2026, there will be an interim COP16.2 next year to decide how to raise and distribute the money.
Other developments
The issue of how countries will monitor and report success — essentially a report card on how they’re progressing — toward the targets of the GBF was also not resolved at COP16. Given that none of the last set of 10-year targets, agreed on during COP10 in Aichi, Japan, were fully met, there is concern over how countries will be held accountable.
While some issues were left unresolved, COP16 saw progress on the mainstreaming of biodiversity across key sectors — essentially ensuring that biodiversity is considered in all sectors of the economy including mining, forestry, fisheries, agriculture and finance. Eighteen countries (so far), including Canada, have supported a government-led mainstreaming champions group that will help achieve GBF targets.
Unlike COP15’s triumphant finish, this year’s meeting left serious questions about how the world will pay to protect nature. Overall, there was a disconcerting lack of urgency on implementing the ambitious framework signed in Montreal, which pledged to end nature loss and bring endangered species back from the brink of extinction. There were shards of hope, however, as attendees headed home from Cali, with another 10 countries submitting their biodiversity action plans.
With the UN Climate Change Conference (COP29) set to begin in Baku, Azerbaijan, in less than a week, it was encouraging to see a commitment by countries to better align their biodiversity strategies with their national climate plans and to explore stronger collaboration between the climate and biodiversity conventions.
