UN COP16 nature talks gridlocked as conservation funding trickles in

By Jake Spring and Oliver Griffin

Countries were at an impasse over how to fund conservation and other key decisions as the U.N. COP16 biodiversity summit entered its second week on Monday, with nations pledging millions of dollars rather than the billions needed.

Seven countries and one provincial government pledged an additional $163 million to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund on Monday, dubbed the summit's "finance day."

The fund was established to help realize the goals laid out in the landmark 2022 Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, aimed at ending nature loss by 2030. COP16 in the Colombian mountain town of Cali is tasked with implementing that agreement.

Advocacy groups said the pledges - which brings the total raised by the fund to about $400 million - fell far short of the billions of dollars envisioned for the fund.

"It's very little. We are talking about millions that have been pledged. But what we are expecting are billions," said Irene Wabiwa, a biodiversity advocate at Greenpeace.

"When looking at the increased rate of biodiversity loss, the way money is flowing is very, very slow. And we are very scared."

With nature in unprecedented decline and species going extinct faster than ever, scientists warned the world's governments that there is no time to waste.

Currently about 38% of the world's tree species - totaling 16,425 species - are at risk of extinction thanks to timber logging and clear-cutting to make way for farming, mining, road-building and other development efforts, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).

"We need to take urgent action ... if we really want to keep these tree (species) alive," IUCN Director Grethel Aguilar told a news briefing in Cali.

The summit, which marks the 16th meeting of parties to the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), is debating how to implement 23 goals outlined in the 2022 Kunming-Montreal agreement.

Chief among those goals is having each country set aside 30% of its land and sea territory for conservation by 2030 - a target known as the 30-by-30 goal.

As of Monday, only 17.6% of the world's land area and inland waters were under some form of protection, according to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP). Many countries have yet to submit pledges despite this month's deadline.

Commitments for protecting the open ocean were even lower - with only 8.4% of maritime and coastal areas now protected, the UNEP report said.

The UNEP chief urged countries to not only meet the 30% conservation goal, but also to target high-value lands and waterways for protection rather than favoring wastelands or other areas that already have little wildlife and small human populations.

"We cannot be seduced by just these numbers," UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen said on the sidelines of the summit. "Nature cannot be put in a museum."

By the summit's end on Friday, negotiators and observers hope to achieve progress on a raft of issues touching on financing, genetic material, Indigenous representation and conservation policy.

"The discussions are going well, but it's a heavy agenda," said David Ainsworth, a spokesperson for the secretariat.

While the intensity of these discussions shows countries' engagement, it is also in some cases a sign "of a relatively low level of trust" between countries, Ainsworth said. "They have a lot of work to do this week."

So far, delegates are close to agreeing on a measure to recognize and include Indigenous groups in biodiversity decision-making, including with a new permanent presence for these groups within the official U.N. CBD process.

But many are watching for COP16 to deliver strong options for funding conservation as a measure of the summit's success.

Summit talks on how to mobilize the billions of dollars needed to halt biodiversity loss this decade were stuck on Monday, as country delegates debated whether there should be an additional fund created to handle this financing.