This article is also available in Italian / Questo articolo è disponibile anche in italiano

From Cali - On Saturday morning, 27 October, puffy rain clouds loomed over the Pacific Valley Exhibition Center in Cali, where the 16th U.N. Biodiversity Negotiations are taking place. As delegate groups sip coffee (strictly Colombian), there are jokes about how the gray clouds are a perfect metaphor for the progress of the negotiations. It's not raining yet, but at moment it doesn't bode well.

The Cop of the People, as the Colombian presidency wanted to christen COP16, is certainly a success: there is great attention given to indigenous rights, minorities, the role of women, communities, as evidenced by panels and events held in the governmental (blue) and civilian (green) zones. But the COP of Implementation, as renamed by the CBD chair, to concretize the Global Biodiversity Framework, instead struggles to eliminate the many options on the table in the negotiating text and reach consensus by the end of next week.

It bears repeating: COP16 needs to find strategies to scale-up finance for nature and accelerate the action of biodiversity blueprints (NBSAPs), ensuring transparent and effective reporting of joint efforts. There are currently only 34 submitted NBSAPs, out of more than 196. The most recent plans declared are those of Colombia, Libya, Moldova, UAE and Uganda. Will anything change in the high-level segment?

The stalemate that threatens to block COP16

The stalemate reproduces the classic impasse that has slowed even the climate negotiations for years. Western countries do not want to shell out money but want sophisticated financial instruments developing countries demand resources, in whatever form; China refuses to join the club of the developed countries, the Latin American bloc always reminds everyone of the issue of rights and minorities, and Russia points to its feet… well to remind that it exists.

Even Friday's evening full CBD plenary did not put enough pressure on the Contact and Working Groups (two forms of negotiating meetings) to reduce the number of options on the documents, which still crowd the texts. All brackets has to be eliminated if consensus among all Parties must be reached. One of the strongest criticisms has been on the Global Environmental Facility, a multilateral agency tasked with funding climate and biodiversity-related projects that is supposed to manage the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, according to the Global Biodiversity Framework, which is expected to reach and disburse toward the least developed countries at least 20 billion US dollars a year by 2025 and 30 billion by the end of the decade.

Disagreements are related to the Facility's structure: for critics, country representation on its board is unbalanced, and access to funds hostile, while it is unclear who should support it and who will benefit. Behind this opposition are many of the megadiverse countries that would be the main receptacles of the harvested resources (Brazil, Congo, Indonesia) but would prefer to have more weight in the GEF and less control over project implementation. "Biodiversity funding should go where the biodiversity is”, Brazilian negotiator André Aranha Corrêa do Lago said in a corridor commentary. “The voice of countries that bear a greater burden should count more than the GEF governance system.”

For the NGO Survival International, the GEF portfolio "has so far been dominated by U.N. agencies and a select handful of mostly U.S.-based conservation organizations," and reinforces "old and failed top-down, colonial-style models of conservation, especially through the establishment of national parks." A positioning that, according to a European negotiator who prefers not to reveal his identity, risks halting the whole package.

The financial issue

The real and tragic issue is the financing gap affecting the GEF. At the moment only Canada, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, Spain, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and New Zealand have contributed to the GBF Fund. And yet less than 300 million are in the pot.  Will there be further announcements from G7 countries, such as the U.S. and Italy? Most importantly, will biodiversity finance be limited to developed countries or, as the brackets in the negotiated texts show, can countries in transition be added, as happened last year with the UAE offering 100 million for the Loss and Damage fund (the first time a non-industrialized country contributed financially within a UN negotiation)?

“Despite constructive conversations this week and some promising progress on the 'easier' issues at COP16, there is still a need to build meaningful trust on the issue of financing," says Lin Li, Senior Director of Global Policy & Advocacy at WWF International. Countries need to move beyond simply reiterating their positions and instead look for solutions to make real progress. “We are only two months away from 2025, the deadline COP15 set for developed countries to provide $20 billion a year to developing countries for biodiversity conservation. It is critical that adequate, timely and affordable funding reaches the people and places that need it most," Li adds.

Progress and perspectives of COP16

Various advances were made by the two Working Groups on different points of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, and the Nagoya Protocol on Access, Reporting and Transparency of Developments of GBF Targets and Benefit Sharing from the Genetic Code (DSI Mechanism). On the latter, Cop16 chairwoman Susana Muhamad of Colombia highlighted the significant progress, adding that when it is put into practice, "it will be a victory for justice and equity."

Negotiations on the development of a thematic action plan on capacity building in the Contact Group on Synthetic Biology reflected the parties' divergent approaches to new biotechnologies and conflicting views on the role of the Convention and the Cartagena Protocol in their assessment and regulation. Finally, the Contact Group on Climate Change engaged in the complex exercise on finding interconnections between biodiversity and climate and the contribution of biodiversity to climate-related goals. But progress has been limited.

On Thursday, 31, the high-level segment begins, which will be attended by six heads of state, 110 ministers, 23 deputy ministers (for Italy there will be Undersecretary Claudio Barbaro) and more than 70 leaders of international organizations. The hope is that they will arrive with a clear mandate and aim to return home with a successful outcome. A failure at COP16 would be unacceptable. But would anyone hold their government accountable?

To find out more, keep following us: after covering the Montreal-Kunming agreement in 2022, from 25 to 2 November Renewable Matter will be in Cali for COP16, as the only accredited Italian publication. The journalistic coverage is realised with the support of 3Bee, united in promoting the progress of national strategies for the protection of biodiversity. Visit us in the press room!

Image: UN Biodiversity