COP16: More than 85% of countries miss UN deadline to submit nature pledges

More than 85% of countries are set to miss the UN’s deadline to submit new nature pledges ahead of the COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, according to a joint investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian.

Three of the G7 nations are among those not to publish new national pledges, known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs), ahead of the talks, which will take place in the city of Cali from from 21 October to 1 November.

Only five of the 17 “megadiverse countries” – which together provide a home to 70% of the world’s biodiversity – have produced new pledges for tackling nature loss, according to the Carbon Brief and Guardian analysis.

The three nations that hold the vast majority of the Amazon rainforest – Brazil, Peru and COP16 host nation Colombia – have all failed to produce new nature plans before the talks.

All of the six countries responsible for the Congo basin in Africa, the world’s second-largest rainforest after the Amazon, also missed the deadline.

Representatives from environment ministries across the world tell Carbon Brief and the Guardian that “technical difficulties” and “structural barriers” – ranging from the need for lengthy consultations with stakeholders to delays caused by general elections – prevented them from meeting the deadline.

Biodiversity on Earth is declining at a faster rate than at any time in human history. Around one million animal and plant species face extinction, with human activity having already altered 70% of the land surface and 87% of the ocean. 

Missed deadlines and delays

At COP15 in 2022, nations signed a landmark agreement called the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which aims to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030. It is often described as the “Paris Agreement for nature”.

As part of the agreement, countries agreed to submit new NBSAPs “by” COP16 in October 2024.

NBSAPs are blueprints for how individual countries plan to tackle biodiversity loss, as well as ensure they meet the targets outlined in the GBF.

They are similar to nationally determined contributions (NDCs), plans that outline how individual countries envisage meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. However, a key difference is that countries are legally obliged to submit NDCs, but not NBSAPs.

The publishing of new NBSAPs was meant to ensure that countries actually implement the targets of the GBF within their borders. A lack of implementation was widely cited as one of the major factors behind the failure of the last set of global biodiversity rules, the Aichi targets, which were agreed in 2010.

However, the Carbon Brief and Guardian analysis shows that just 25 countries and the EU have met the deadline to publish an NBSAP ahead of COP16. This leaves 170 countries that have not met the deadline.

(Carbon Brief’s in-depth NBSAP tracker contains a full list of the 26 parties that have published an NBSAP and examines what their plans say about stemming biodiversity loss.)

Rainforests at risk

Only five of the 17 “megadiverse countries” – which together provide a home to 70% of the world’s biodiversity – have produced new NBSAPs. This includes Australia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mexico. 

The megadiverse countries to miss the deadline are Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, India, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa and Venezuela. (The US is a megadiverse country, but is not a signatory to the biodiversity convention.)

A representative for COP16 host nation Colombia tells Carbon Brief and the Guardian that the country has been working “for over a year” on its NBSAP, starting before the country knew it would host the next round of biodiversity talks. (Colombia offered to host COP16 last year after the original host Turkey was forced to withdraw following major earthquakes in the country.)

In 2024, the environment ministry “organised more than 30 events in every region of the country, reaching more than 20 cities” to consult a range of Indigenous and local community groups on the ministry’s proposal for tackling nature loss in the country, the spokesperson says. 

This lengthy consultation process has caused the country to miss the deadline, the spokesperson adds. However, they say that Colombia plans to publish its NBSAP at the start of the COP16 summit.

A representative for Brazil – the most biodiverse nation on Earth, home to nearly 60% of the Amazon rainforest – also tells Carbon Brief and the Guardian that the publishing of its NBSAP has been delayed by a “broad consultation process”.

Braulio Dias, director of biodiversity conservation at the Brazilian ministry of environment, who is responsible for the NBSAP process, says:

“Brazil is a huge country with the largest share of biodiversity [and] a large population with a complex governance. We are a federation with 26 states and 5,570 municipalities. We started the process to update our NBSAP in May last year and have managed to conclude a broad consultation process involving over a thousand people in face-to-face meetings.

“We are in the process of consolidating all proposals received, consulting all the departments of the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, all the federal ministries and agencies engaged in the biodiversity agenda and the National Biodiversity Committee, before we can have a high-level political endorsement. Then we still have to build a monitoring strategy, a finance strategy and a communication strategy. We will only conclude this process toward the end of the year or early next year.”

The representative of another megadiverse nation, India, declined repeated requests for comment on why it has not published its NBSAP.

Back in August, Dr V Rajagopalan, chair of India’s working group tasked with reviewing the country’s NBSAP, told Carbon Brief that one challenge for the country was translating the global goals of the GBF into a workable plan for the nation:

“Our situation is different from the west: what can be done there, cannot be done here. [F]or example, [the issue of] subsidies is a challenge for us – similarly, pesticides – because of our agricultural status and food-security requirements. But, still, we have kept our targets very ambitious.”

UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker tells Carbon Brief and the Guardian that she expects India to announce its NBSAP during COP16.

Commenting on why so many nations have missed the deadline to submit new NBSAPs before COP16, Schomaker says that some countries have struggled to access the funding needed to prepare their plans or have been delayed by pursuing a “whole of society” approach to pulling them together. She adds:

“More NBSAPs would be better. That’s clear…These are different processes and better than we’ve had in the past.”

Major economies missing

Three of the G7 nations did not produce new NBSAPs ahead of COP16. Germany and the UK missed the deadline, while the US is not a signatory to the convention.

Missing the target time could be particularly damaging for the UK’s reputation at the negotiations. It campaigned for an ambitious agreement at COP15 and is the oceans lead of the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People group of nations.

The UK pledged to publish its NBSAP by May of this year – and even organised a launch event at Wicken Fen nature reserve in Cambridgeshire for that month – before a change of government in Scotland forced a postponement.

The release of the strategy was delayed further by a UK general election in July – and the new Labour party government now intends to publish it in the new year, as revealed by Carbon Brief earlier this month.

Although it will not now publish a new NBSAP before COP16, the UK did provide the UN with a technical document, known as a national target submission, in place of its strategy. (Around 77 countries have submitted national targets to the CBD ahead of COP16, according to Schomaker.)

When approached about missing the deadline for producing a new NBSAP ahead of COP16, a spokesperson for the Department for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) referred to the UK’s national target submission, saying:

“Nature and our wildlife underpin everything – the economy, food, health and society. That is why we have submitted the UK’s biodiversity targets to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), aligning us with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and committing us to achieve the agreements made at COP15.”