COP16 in Cali call for unified action on biodiversity and climate

The biodiversity summit decided to improve policy coherence across the Rio Conventions. But there was little concrete progress on critical issues like financing and forests.

The 16th Conference Of the Parties (COP) of the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) ended a bit abruptly after a majority of government representatives (mostly from developing countries) had to leave the venue to catch their flights home while the meeting was being extended through Friday night to Saturday morning. By then, still no agreement had been found on the thorniest issues of all, who was going to pay what for biodiversity conservation in poorer countries, and on the mechanism for how that funding would be distributed and managed. It is as yet unclear how and when that final point of discussion will be continued and finalised.

The failure of the CBD conference to come to fruitful conclusions on the issue of finance can be seen as a warning for COP29, the climate summit taking place in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the same discussion, though involving rather larger numbers, will be centre stage. It is hard to shrug off the feeling that we will see a similar failure at COP29.

COP16 thus ended rather like it started, as a large number of governments failed to bring to Cali the National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans that they promised to develop at COP15 in 2022. Only 44 countries (out of 196) had been able to finalise their work before COP16, which also indicates the huge challenge many developing countries are facing due to a lack of adequate funding to even develop the plans they require funding for.

During the conference, a number of interesting agreements were made which included the establishment of a permanent body within the CBD that would ensure better representation of indigenous peoples and local communities in CBD decision-making, thus elevating the critical role indigenous peoples have in biodiversity protection. Furthermore, a (voluntary) multilateral benefit-sharing mechanism (the Cali Fund) was agreed to ensure developing countries would gain some (minimal) benefits from medicinal and other uses of plants that are found on their territories.

As for the forest issue, in much the same way as the climate conferences have shied away from discussing fossil fuels, the issue of their further destruction was not really discussed during the official negotiations. Looking through the many decisions that were adopted, it is hard to find the word “forests”. In addition, the unofficial programme of side-events and conferences did not give forests the high profile that this ecosystem, home to a large share of the world’s biodiversity, deserves, given the state of the world’s forests and the challenge of continued deforestation and forest degradation.

What’s more, the decision that was adopted on the linkage between climate change and biodiversity, only indirectly referred to forests, as the decision calls for support to the first Global Stocktake under the UNFCCC and in particular for its paragraph 33 which calls for “halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030”. The decision on climate change and biodiversity further points out the need for greater synergies between the work of the UN Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This decision also calls on the presidents of CBD COP16 (Colombia), UNFCCC COP29 (Azerbaijan) and COP30 (Brazil) to collaboratively look at opportunities for strengthened multilateral coordination on climate change and biodiversity loss. It also instructs the secretariat of the CBD to promote synergies and closer cooperation with the UNFCCC secretariat as well as with other biodiversity-relevant multilateral environmental agreements, organisations and processes (which includes the UN Forum of Forests), with the aim of promoting integrated approaches to addressing biodiversity loss and climate change. In the decision, governments also agreed to request all countries and stakeholders (including NGOs) to submit by May 2025 views on options for enhanced policy coherence, including a potential joint work programme for the Rio Conventions (which in addition to the CBD, UNFCCC and UNCCD include the Convention to Combat Desertification), as part of the work of the (currently rather weak) Joint Liaison Group of the Rio Conventions. And finally, the decision calls for the secretariats of the Rio Conventions to collaborate on the organisation, in 2025, of a joint technical meeting to further explore options to enhance cooperation and policy coherence.