The COP16 biodiversity summit came to an abrupt halt after countries failed to reach consensus on the creation of a new fund during a mammoth 10-hour final plenary session.

Countries debated through the night on Friday in Cali, Colombia, in an attempt to get through the many items on COP16’s agenda.

But, as the talks dragged on into Saturday morning, a large number of developing-country delegates were forced to catch flights home, leaving parties without the “quorum” needed to reach consensus on key issues.

Countries did manage to find consensus on a new benefit-sharing mechanism for genetic resources – known as the “Cali fund” – after lengthy discussions and last-minute text changes put forward by India to protect sovereign rights.

Nations also agreed to a new permanent body for Indigenous peoples, which will allow them to advise and offer their view at biodiversity COPs directly for the first time.

However, the thorny issue of setting up a new fund under the COP – and the final agenda item on a new framework for monitoring countries’ progress on tackling biodiversity loss – will need to be revisited when the COP resumes in Rome in late February 2025.

Talks were overshadowed by a lack of progress on implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the landmark “Paris Agreement for nature” deal made at COP15 in Montreal in 2022.

A joint investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian revealed just before the summit opened that the vast majority of countries missed a deadline to set out new plans for how they will meet the targets of the framework ahead of COP16.

By the summit’s end, just 44 out of 196 parties – 22% – had come up with new biodiversity plans.

Some megadiverse nations and major economies said they did not have the time needed to put plans in place, while developing countries said they were not provided with the funding required to produce new pledges.

Below, Carbon Brief has an in-depth summary and analysis of all of the key outcomes of COP16.

Formal negotiations

National biodiversity pledges (NBSAPs) and global review

NBSAPs

COP16 was the first biodiversity summit since nations signed a landmark agreement in late 2022 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 GBF and its underlying documents, countries agreed to submit new national biodiversity pledges, known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs) “by” COP16, which began on 21 October.

The new NBSAPs were meant to outline how countries will implement the goals and targets of the GBF within their borders.

As such, the publishing of new NBSAPs was viewed by many as a key test of whether countries are taking action to ensure biodiversity loss is reversed by 2030.

For the past year, Carbon Brief has been closely tracking the release of new NBSAPs. A handful of European nations, including Spain, Ireland and France, were the first to release new NBSAPs in 2023 and early 2024.

In the months leading up to COP16, progress was slow. In September, just one month before COP16, only 19 parties out of 196 had released new NBSAPs.

Just ahead of the summit in October, Carbon Brief co-published an investigation with the Guardian finding that 85% of nations – 170 out of 196 parties – were set to miss the deadline to release new NBSAPs by COP16.

This included 12 of the 17 “megadiverse countries”, which together provide a home to 70% of the world’s biodiversity. (The US is a megadiverse country, but is not party to the CBD.)

Carbon Brief and the Guardian spoke to several major economies and megadiverse nations about why they were unable to meet the deadline.

Megadiverse nations Brazil and Colombia said the timeframe given to produce new NBSAPs was not long enough to properly consult all the relevant stakeholders and Indigenous groups; India referenced difficulties translating the targets to a local context; and the UK blamed multiple changes in power, both in Scotland and at the national level.

Elsewhere, many developing nations said that a lack of timely funding available from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a major multilateral environmental fund, had prevented them from being able to produce new NBSAPs.

Several parties published new NBSAPs during the summit itself – just after the deadline. This included COP16 host Colombia, as well as Germany, Iran, Venezuela, Peru, India, Thailand, Tanzania, Vietnam, Argentina and the Netherlands.

By the summit’s end on 2 November, 44 out of 196 parties had produced new NBSAPs.

According to the GBF and its underlying documents, countries that were “not in a position” to meet the deadline to submit NBSAPs ahead of COP16 were requested to instead submit national targets.

These submissions simply list biodiversity targets that countries will aim for without an accompanying plan for how they will be achieved.

By the end of the summit, some 119 parties had produced national targets.

This included many developing nations. Bernadette Fischler Hooper, global advocacy lead at WWF, told Carbon Brief that this demonstrated the willingness of developing countries to implement the targets of the GBF, despite not having the funds required to produce NBSAPs.

One of the major tasks for negotiators in Cali was to decide how to move forward after the majority of countries failed to produce new NBSAPs ahead of the talks.

At the end of the summit, a new decision text on NBSAPs was adopted.

The text “urges” countries that have not yet done so to release new NBSAPs “as soon as possible”. (In UN language terms, “urges” is stronger than “invites” or “encourages”, but not as strong as “requests” or “instructs”.)

Carbon Brief understands that, during the negotiations for the text, the UK put forward the idea of putting in a timeframe of “as soon as possible and no later than October 2025”. 

(October 2025 is the date of the next Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) meeting.)

However, “the room did not seem taken” by the UK’s proposal, according to an insider, with many parties having the view that “as soon as possible” should be interpreted as meaning immediately.

Fischler Hooper told Carbon Brief that she had hoped to see the language say “as soon as possible, but no later than the end of 2025”, adding:

“Generally, having a clear deadline is good to keep countries to account. ‘As soon as possible’ is commonly understood as ‘really really soon’ and we can only hope that parties see it that way too.”

In acknowledgement of developing countries’ difficulties in producing new NBSAPs, the text also “requests” the GEF to “provide timely support to all eligible parties, aligned with national circumstances and needs, upon request, to enable them to” release new NBSAPs.

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Global review

The GBF and its underlying documents also set out a plan for how countries’ biodiversity plans should be reviewed and monitored.

According to these documents, parties must submit national reports containing agreed headline indicators in 2026 and 2029. (See: Monitoring framework.)

At COP16 and “subsequent COPs”, a global analysis of “NBSAPs, including national targets” should be conducted to assess progress towards achieving the GBF.

A “global review” should then be held, section J of the GBF says. This is an element that observers believe could be key for implementation. The underlying document says this global review should take place at COP17 in 2026 and COP19 in 2028.

After global reviews, there will be “voluntary peer reviews”, according to the GBF, after which countries “may take the outcome of the global reviews into account in future revisions and implementation of their” NBSAPs and national targets.

In Cali, negotiators were tasked with hammering out the finer details of how this reviewing process should work.

Towards the end of the summit, they produced a new text deciding on the details for the global review at COP17 and COP19.

The text “decides” that the global review “will culminate in a decision or decisions by the COPs, including any recommendations, as necessary, to identify and address challenges in collective progress in implementation, including on the means of implementation”.

It specifies that the global review “should be focused on assessing collective progress and that the review will be undertaken in a facilitative, non-intrusive and non-punitive manner”. It adds that the review should be a “party-driven process”.

The text also says the global review should draw on national reports, advice from subsidiary bodies and a “global report” on the “collective progress” of countries in meeting biodiversity goals.

This global report will “draw upon data and information provided by parties and the best available peer-reviewed scientific, technical and technological information, as well as traditional knowledge given access to with the free, prior, informed consent of Indigenous people and local communities”.

The text does not clearly state how countries will need to respond to the global review, beyond “recalling” the decision under the GBF that countries “may” revise their NBSAPs in response.

One observer who followed the negotiations closely described the omission of any kind of follow up to the global review as a “main concern”, telling Carbon Brief:

“Parties must be much clearer about what they will do in response to the outcomes of the global review.”

The observer added that the final text “significantly reduced the number of inputs into the global review”, leaving little room for civil society to voice their concerns.

In addition, the global review text lacks any mention of “high-level political oversight”, which could have helped with engaging countries on implementation, the observer added.

The global review text was due to be adopted at the end of COP16’s final plenary. However, after 10 hours of negotiations, a large number of developing-country delegates were forced to catch flights home, leaving parties without the “quorum” needed to continue. The text will now need to be revisited at intersessional meetings next year.

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Finance

Finance was the headline “fight” of COP16, with deep divisions between developed and developing countries.

Just before 8:30am on Saturday morning, countries reached a stalemate on establishing a brand-new global biodiversity fund under the COP’s governance, which had been a key demand of developing countries. 

As a requested check revealed that the COP no longer achieved quorum, discussions on the contours and governance of this fund will resume at a reconvening of COP16, in Rome in February 2025. 

While the failure to establish a new catch-all fund disappointed developing countries, the Colombian presidency attempted a last-minute push to have the fund established. The draft decision text issued at 3:30 am also included one of the presidency’s key priorities for the conference – the recognition of existing high debt burdens. This was despite pushback from debtor countries, such as China. 

The final draft decision text on resource mobilisation “takes note of” efforts to accelerate international financial sector reform and calls for a review of how the global debt crisis is impacting biodiversity action. 

​Reacting to the final text, Oscar Soria of the Common Initiative, said:

“Mobilising sufficient finance to achieve biodiversity goals has been a major issue for 30 years now. We saw insufficient leadership from wealthier countries: the EU and France in particular, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, the UK, but also China.

The Colombian presidency was pushing for important topics to be included in conversations, such as sovereign debt, and put forward a rather exhaustive list of ways to explore biodiversity finance. [But] the state of distrust between developing and developed countries, and choices made by minister Muhamad in how she organised the process, made the negotiations very challenging in the last hours.”

Lim Li Ching of the Third World Network told Carbon Brief:

“The [global] north gets to keep the status quo. The [global south] gets a process.

“Rich nations’ refusal to consider a dedicated fund to help finance biodiversity action in poorer nations has widened distrust and delayed progress on implementation. Resource mobilisation will have to be at the top of the agenda when COP16 resumes.”

The Cali talks were a litmus test for whether and how countries had met their commitments to fund the GBF’s ambitious goals: to mobilise “at least $200bn per year” for biodiversity conservation by 2030 from “all sources”– domestic, international, public and private. 

Of this, developed countries – along with others that “voluntarily assume” their obligations – are expected to “substantially and progressively increase” their international finance flows for nature “to at least $20bn per year by 2025, and to at least $30bn per year by 2030”, the GBF text states.

Two years ago, a finance package was rapidly gavelled through as part of the COP15 deal by the Chinese presidency, despite protest from developing countries. (See: Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of COP15’s key outcomes.)

This ending was still fresh in countries’ minds from day one of the summit, when conversations around resource mobilisation and finance were herded, along with other fraught issues, into a working group.

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New fund and financial mechanism

In the run-up to COP15, developing countries, including South Africa, supported Brazil’s call for a new nature fund governed by the COP. In Montreal, countries accepted an interim fund – the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) – hosted under the Global Environment Facility (GEF). 

By September this year, seven developed countries had contributed a total of less than $250m to the GBFF. The COP16 decision text on the financial mechanism, which was not passed, notes that “a number of eligible [p]arties have not yet accessed support from the GEF, in particular for the revision and updating of national biodiversity strategies”. 

On the first day of COP16, Zimbabwe, speaking for Africa, and Brazil, speaking for megadiverse countries, revived the fight for a new fund that is separate from the GEF. In its intervention, Zimbabwe described the expectation that developed countries would deliver on the $20bn target as “seemingly wishful thinking”, but said that it could still be achieved “depending on what we decide at this COP16”.

Two days later, co-chairs published a 98-page-long non-paper that compiled what countries wanted for biodiversity finance over the next five years through to 2030. Non-papers are informal documents that bring together divergent views as parties attempt to reach a legal consensus. Non-papers do not usually attribute country positions explicitly, but this one included each country’s name alongside its wishlist for a new resource strategy.

In their submissions to the non-paper and elsewhere, developed countries, including Australia, Japan, the EU and others, opposed an entirely new fund. Many suggested leaving out references to Article 20 and 21 of the CBD, which cover equity. They also resisted including an update on their pledges to the GBFF. 

“Finance day” at COP16, on 28 October, saw attempts and initiatives to thaw the resource deadlock. Seven countries, including New Zealand, France and Austria, as well as Quebec – the first sub-national government to do so – pledged $163m in total to the GBFF, taking the fund up to $396m. 

Countries, observers and civil society reacted sharply to the announcement.

“We are talking about millions that have been pledged…But what we are expecting are billions,” Irène Wabiwa Betoko from Greenpeace told Reuters. 

Brian O’Donnell, from Campaign for Nature, told Carbon Brief that “at least this $163m is grant money and not loans”. 

As COP16 drew to a close, the future of the new fund seemed increasingly uncertain. After eight sessions of the contact group on resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism, (co-chaired by Ines Verleye of Belgium and Patrick Luna of Brazil), negotiations went straight to closed-door meetings with ministers and heads of delegation.  

On Friday 1 November, the scheduled final day of COP16, the Colombian presidency released a draft decision text that proposed bumping discussions around a new funding instrument to intersessional discussions after COP16, with little other detail. 

At 3:30 am on Saturday, well into overtime, COP16 president Susanna Muhamad alerted tired delegates to a new draft decision text on resource mobilisation. In an unexpected turn, the document contained a proposal to establish a new global biodiversity fund under the COP’s governance by COP30.  

However, the passing of the text was prevented by the COP’s failure to reach quorum. This text will likely be on top of the agenda when COP16 resumes in Rome in February next year. 

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$20bn tussle

A key tension at COP16 was a commitment in the GBF for developed countries to collectively mobilise “at least” $20bn a year by 2025 to progressively fill a $700bn biodiversity finance gap by 2030.

In Cali, with two months to go until 2025, it was unclear if developed countries would end up meeting this target, with almost all of them falling far short of their “fair share”. (See: Carbon Brief’s in-depth piece on biodiversity finance and fair shares.) 

In the latest reporting data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – which is only as recent as 2022 – developed countries, including the US, had contributed $12.1bn towards biodiversity finance in 2022. Furthermore, only $3.8bn of that finance was biodiversity-specific.

On Wednesday, 30 October, ministers from 20 developing countries issued a statement urging global-north governments to meet and exceed the $20bn target and to set up a working group of finance and environment ministers to get it done on time. 

The Ministerial Alliance for Ambition on Nature Finance comprised Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Dominica, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Grenada, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Madagascar, Nigeria, St Kitts and Nevis, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Togo, Vanuatu and Zambia.

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Private and innovative funding

Attempts to thaw the finance deadlock began right from the start of COP16, chiefly through private and “innovative” finance initiatives: from biodiversity credits to green taxonomies and bonds and special hybrid funds.

Biodiversity credits were one of these mechanisms that saw both an increased push and increased civil society pushback at COP16. (See Carbon Brief’s in-depth Q&A on biodiversity offsets.) 

Long-time CBD observers were surprised at their resurgence over the past two years. Neth Daño, Asia director of the ETC Group research collective, told Carbon Brief:

“In 2010, they killed the idea of biodiversity credits. Nobody thought they would come back like a zombie.”

On 28 October, the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits launched its framework for “high-integrity” principles for biodiversity markets, supported by France and the UK. The principles were dubbed “extremely problematic” by the Green Finance Observatory, a sustainable finance thinktank. 

Meanwhile, the Brazil-led Tropical Forests Finance Facility (TFFF) received the backing of Colombia and the UAE, as well as Malaysia, Indonesia, DRC and Ghana. The fund aims to raise $125bn for the six rainforest nations – dubbed the “Opec of rainforests” – through re-investing long-term loans from six developed countries: Norway, US, UK, France, Germany and Sweden.

While mobilising resources from “all sources” was the one point of consensus among parties in finance negotiations, the emphasis on private and “innovative” funding was criticised by developing countries. 

In a press conference on 30 October, DRC’s environment minister, Ève Bazaiba, condemned developed countries for not meeting their commitments. She also championed the Lion’s Share Fund, which hopes to raise funds from companies and brands that use biodiversity in their logos and advertising.

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Digital sequence information

Of all negotiation tracks, digital sequence information (DSI) was one of the most keenly anticipated at COP16. 

DSI is a term used at international talks to refer to genetic information from plants and animals.

This genetic information is often sourced from plants and animals in developing, biodiversity-rich countries by companies headquartered mainly in the global north, who use it to make products, such as drugs, cosmetics and food.

Because of this, developing nations have long called for the establishment of an international mechanism that can ensure that the benefits from DSI are shared fairly with the people living where the resources were discovered, including Indigenous groups.

While a fund and mechanism for sharing the benefits of DSI had already been established at COP15 in Montreal, many major loopholes remained in how both would work before it could formally begin. 

This work was delegated to an “ad-hoc open-ended working group” on DSI, which met twice to resolve outstanding issues. 

Earlier this month, negotiators met in Montreal for “five days of intense negotiations” to narrow down the options for the mechanism and fund, as well as how funds would “flow” through them.

This included deliberations on who would pay to use DSI, how much they would pay, what would “trigger” such payments, how this money would be disbursed – and to whom. It also covered how the entire mechanism would be managed and governed. 

Discussions on DSI were carried out under a dedicated contact group that met eight times to resolve the 311 square brackets (denoting unresolved issues) that still remained in the text at the outset of the summit. 

At COP16, countries agreed to the first-ever global fund to which companies using genetic data “should contribute”, along with a unique multilateral mechanism to support it.

Pharmaceutical, cosmetics, agribusiness, nutraceutical and technology conglomerates that benefit from genetic data “should” contribute 1% of their profits, or 0.1% of their revenue, to the landmark “Cali fund” under the agreement.

However, DSI experts told Carbon Brief that the use of the word “should” implies that contributing to the fund is still voluntary and that the payment rates are “indicative”, non-binding ones. In the run-up to COP16, blocs including African and Latin American countries sought a legally binding mechanism on DSI.

Additionally, companies could potentially avoid paying, since they are no longer required to prove that they did not use genetic data. A key clause was removed from the penultimate draft of the document that asked companies to “demonstrate” that they were not using DSI. 

Instead, the final text leaves the decision up to companies.

Agribusiness – or “animal and plant breeding”, as it reads in the text – nearly escaped scrutiny, as a reference to agribusiness was removed from the “indicative list of sectors” that may benefit from the use of DSI. While it was included in the president’s draft issued on Friday morning, it had disappeared from the draft text issued later that night. 

This raised concern among observers that other industries could be similarly lobbying for their exclusion from the list. (Carbon Brief understands that Switzerland raised the potential for removing pharmaceuticals from the list on the margins of the negotiations.)

Animal and plant breeding was added back into the text that was, ultimately, adopted at the plenary.

Nithin Ramakrishnan, a DSI expert at Third World Network, told Carbon Brief:

“The decision is giving biopirates a chance to make a one-time donation to the Cali Fund and get away with it.”

Despite countries such as Zimbabwe – opposed by Japan and Canada – insisting that academia and research institutions should contribute to the fund, this is no longer the case. Instead, these institutions are only expected to make explicit on their databases the countries of origin of data, to provide cues to users of these databases on to whom benefits should go to. Preserving open access was a key priority for the EU, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, Norway and Australia. 

The final text states that at least half of all benefits going to the fund must be used to meet the “self-identified” needs of Indigenous communities in developing countries, particularly women and youth, although it concedes that this could be limited by “national circumstances”. 

Countries, too, will receive “direct allocations” of funding, a subject that was keenly contested. 

The global mechanism was set to supersede national laws around DSI, access and benefit-sharing, such as those developed by Brazil. However, many countries, including Bangladesh, Bolivia, India, Egypt and Argentina, saw this clause as a “blow to sovereignty” and a “washout for national access-and-benefit sharing laws”. 

At 3:30am – when the Colombian presidency published a new draft DSI decision text – India strongly objected, asking for a clause on ensuring national access-and-benefit-sharing laws to be included in the annex.

Panama raised objections about the limited time to review the draft. At the plenary, it said:

“We’ve spent months on the previous version and we’ve also made sure that we invested resources before we came to the COP to discuss this. Like other small delegations. Panama has many real limitations in terms of its capacity to review and decide on a mechanism of this scope before the end of this COP. We consider that this action does not reflect adequate consideration concerning smaller delegations. And, therefore, we want to state that on many occasions, we were available to support the president in this matter, and we were excluded.”

Ramakrishnan told Carbon Brief:

“Developing countries didn’t yield sovereignty after two years of pressure from developed countries and industry and scientist lobbies [who said] this is a voluntary fund, so [national laws] don’t apply.”

The final decision explicitly does not supersede national legislation. 

One of the key features of the DSI decision is revenue or profit-sharing by large companies benefiting from DSI, which emerged in a non-paper on Wednesday morning.

This was developed from a proposal by the Ocean Biodiversity Collective, which works on providing interdisciplinary expertise to countries on DSI negotiations. Lead researcher from the collective, Dr Siva Thambisetty, told Carbon Brief:

“Providing expertise in fraught negotiations is an opportunity and a challenge. [Our] model, which became the Norway proposal, had several elements to build a new payments system. One of the key values that must be embedded in the mechanism are that contributors ‘pay nature first’. Second, ‘everyone pays’ honours the principle that biodiversity is not a free asset and ensures a broad base for payments. 

“Some of those elements were lost during the push and pull of the discussions. No party ever gets everything they want, of course, but it’s important that the core basis is not mangled going forward. We will need to assess implications fully in the coming days.”

The global DSI fund established by the decision will now be “under the authority of and accountable to” the COP.

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Monitoring framework

The monitoring framework – one part of the negotiations covering mechanisms for planning, monitoring, reporting and review – is seen as critical to the success of the GBF. 

This is, in part, because the failure of the previous set of biodiversity goals, the Aichi targets, has been widely blamed on the lack of implementation. 
The monitoring framework is made up of a set of indicators corresponding to each goal and target of the GBF. There are four types of indicators:

• Headline indicators.
• Binary indicators.
• Component indicators.
• Complementary indicators.

Headline indicators are used to measure progress against quantitative targets, such as the pledge to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030. 

For more qualitative targets, such as the target to mainstream gender considerations across biodiversity planning, a set of binary indicators were developed – yes/no questions that countries answer about the presence or absence of legislation, policies or regulations relating to the target.

Component indicators measure progress towards sub-targets in the GBF, while complementary indicators assess areas that are related, but not necessarily explicitly laid out in the framework.

Countries are mandated to report on headline and binary indicators, but the component and complementary indicators are optional. As a result, throughout the negotiations, countries went back and forth on which indicators should fall into which category.

Lim Li Lin, a senior legal and environment advisor at Third World Network, told Carbon Brief:

“Everyone’s doing a juggle, right? We want the good ones to go in the mandatory, and we want the bad ones to go in the complementary, if we can’t get rid of them. And everyone’s doing the same thing from their own interest and perspective.”

At COP15 in Montreal, countries agreed on a monitoring framework, but that text also included a decision to review the monitoring framework at the subsequent COP and “thereafter keep the monitoring framework under review, as appropriate”.

The Montreal agreement also included the establishment of an ad-hoc technical expert group, which comprised 45 members – 30 representatives from parties and 15 observers, including representatives from the Global Youth Biodiversity Network and the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. 

The ad-hoc group met six times over the course of the two-year interstitial period. An online forum also allowed other individuals and groups to comment on and discuss proposed indicators. The results of those meetings and discussions fed into the discussions in Cali. 

However, the recommendations of the ad-hoc group were not uniformly accepted by parties.

Kirsty Leong, senior specialist on global policy and advocacy at WWF, told Carbon Brief:

“Procedurally, some parties are saying, ‘Hey, we gave a mandate to this expert group. So now we should adopt that framework’…And other parties are saying, ‘Well, actually, we never negotiated, and so everything’s still discussable.’”

A few indicators proved particularly contentious during the negotiations, including those on monitoring pesticide use and those related to digital sequence information and benefit-sharing from genetic resources.

On pesticide use, parties were split over whether countries should report “pesticide environment concentration” or “aggregated total applied toxicity”. 

The former indicator is what was agreed in the decision in Montreal, but the latter is what was suggested by the ad-hoc technical expert group, which said that there is no reliable data on pesticide environment concentration. 

Successive non-papers on the monitoring framework contained longer and longer footnotes about the pesticide indicator as parties struggled to reach consensus.

Version	Date	Footnote text
Non-paper v1	24 October	n/a
Non-paper v2	27 October	[The indicator on pesticide environment concentration was adopted at COP-15 and the indicator aggregated total applied toxicity is a proposal by an expert group that did not find consensus at COP 16]
Non-paper v4	30 October	[[The indicator on pesticide environment concentration was adopted at COP-15 and the indicator aggregated total applied toxicity is a proposal by an expert group that did not find consensus at COP 16][The two alternative headline indicators are maintained to allow reporting on either of the two as well as for further methodological work][When possible the Parties may choose to report on either indicator according to their national and technical capacity and data availability provide valuable information for measuring progress towards the target]
Draft decision	31 October	[[The indicator on pesticide environment concentration was adopted at the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties, and the indicator aggregated total applied toxicity is a proposal by an expert group that did not find consensus at the sixteenth meeting.][The two alternative headline indicators are maintained to allow reporting on either of the two, as well as for further methodological work.][When possible, Parties may choose to report on either indicator according to their national and technical capacity and data availability, and both provide valuable information for measuring progress towards the target.]
Draft decision	1 November	[Parties may choose to report on either pesticide environment concentration or aggregated total applied toxicity headline indicators, depending on the availability of methodology and in accordance with their national circumstances and technical capacities[, recognizing that support will be prioritised for the development of the headline indicator at the furthest level of development at the global level].]

Versions of the footnote explaining the disagreement over pesticide indicators at COP16.

Several ocean conservation experts also raised concerns that indicators on coral reef coverage and health – agreed in the COP15 monitoring framework – had disappeared from the texts put forward at COP16.

Dr Susan Lieberman, vice-president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told Carbon Brief that she was “very disappointed” to see the coral reef indicators disappear. She added:

“Many governments are engaged in tremendous efforts on the conservation and management of their coral reefs, and inclusion of specific indicators of the ecological integrity of their reefs would have helped them report on outcomes.”

Indicators on coral reefs were not present in the final text.

One of the keys for NGOs and civil-society organisations following the monitoring framework negotiations was that, whatever was decided, the final text should include a call to revisit the framework and continue to add to the available indicators. Lim told Carbon Brief: 

“Importantly, they mustn’t close the door to further work on the monitoring framework, because it’s far from complete. But at the same time, we need a monitoring framework, because if we’re not having at least what [already] we have for indicators, then we can’t measure the progress.”

As with so many other agenda items at COP16, discussions around resources and capacity were central to the negotiations around the monitoring framework. Countries face “very real capacity constraints in what they can implement”, Leong told Carbon Brief. 

Country submissions ahead of COP16 showed that some global-south countries, such as Argentina and Brazil, were concerned about the burden of a monitoring framework that was too prescriptive, preferring one instead that was flexible to national circumstances. 

During the working group meeting on the final day of the summit, the DRC requested that the entire monitoring framework be placed in brackets, stating that they could not accept the monitoring framework without a deal on resource mobilisation.

The action proved a decisive one, as the failure of countries to reach consensus on resource mobilisation meant that the monitoring framework was not discussed at the plenary. It will be taken up, along with the finance decisions, at continuation of COP16 that will most likely be tacked on to the CBD’s subsidiary body meetings next year.

Lim told Carbon Brief that through informal consultations, parties would “probably find a landing zone” between the end of COP16 and the subsidiary body meetings. She added:

“We do need the monitoring framework to measure progress. Its delayed adoption is unfortunate but can only be seen in the context of the intransigence of northern governments in the negotiations to help finance poorer nations and stem the theft by their companies of the south’s genetic resources.”

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Article 8(j)

Indigenous rights were one of the major discussion points at COP16, with Indigenous participation reaching an all-time high. 

During a press conference held in the first week of the negotiations, Ramiro Batzin, co-chair of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB), laid out the group’s priorities. (The IIFB is an international organisation that represents Indigenous voices in the CBD negotiations.)

These included a programme of work on Article 8(j) through to 2030 and the creation of a permanent subsidiary body on Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) under the CBD. 

Article 8(j) mandates that parties to the CBD “respect, preserve and maintain” the knowledge of IPLCs related to biodiversity conservation and sustainable use, and to “encourage the equitable sharing of benefits” from this knowledge. 

COP16 saw the adoption of the programme of work to implement Article 8(j) and other provisions related to Indigenous peoples and local communities through to 2030, “prioritising those tasks that contribute directly to the timely, full and effective implementation” of the GBF. 

The programme has nine general principles and eight elements focusing on issues such as biodiversity conservation and restoration, sustainable use, full and effective participation and a human rights-based approach.

The work programme also includes elements such as direct access to funding for biodiversity conservation, restoration and sustainable use for IPLCs.

During a press conference near the close of COP16, several representatives from the IIFB welcomed the adoption of the work programme, calling it a “victory”.

Jennifer Tauli Corpuz, a negotiator and expert for the IIFB based in the Philippines, said:

“This sets us on a path to making sure that the GBF is implemented in full partnership with IPLCs.”

Batzin told Carbon Brief that the work programme will help ensure full implementation of the GBF:

“This programme will provide us with actions and guidelines for evaluation, monitoring and follow-up.”

During the press conference, representatives of Indigenous peoples also called on the parties to adopt the subsidiary body. This group would have a permanent mandate to continue work under the CBD – and was a contentious issue throughout the summit. It was reportedly opposed by Indonesia, Jordan and Russia, as they argued that the working group has been effective already and a new subsidiary body would entail further costs. 

Manuel Mavisoy, from Colombia’s Indigenous Movement’s Permanent Bureau of Concertation, said in that press conference that the subsidiary body “is the only mechanism that ensures the survival of Indigenous peoples’ traditional systems within the GBF”.

In an interview with Carbon Brief, Batzin stated that the subsidiary body would be a permanent institution designed to implement and monitor the Article 8(j) programme of work. Batzin emphasised that the body is intended to operate bilaterally, involving both states and Indigenous peoples – similar to how the Article 8(j) working group currently functions. 

The working group on Article 8(j) has existed for more than 20 years, but it is only a temporary body, therefore it was likely to be disbanded, Corpuz told the press conference. She added that the proposed new subsidiary body would be “higher placed within the CBD”. 

The plenary erupted in a standing ovation late on Friday night as Muhamad brought down the gavel to signify the adoption of the decision to establish a new subsidiary body.

A spokesperson for the IIFB and the Indigenous Women’s Biodiversity Network told the plenary that “this is an unprecedented moment in the history of multilateral agreements on the environment”. She added: 

“This new subsidiary body will be a reference point for the rest of the world…We can feel proud of our work, which was participative, collaborative and constant.”

During the summit, the IPLCs also called for direct access to funding for biodiversity conservation.

The GEF has an “aspirational goal” that IPLCs should receive 20% of biodiversity resources, although no mechanism or action has yet been created to achieve this goal, Batzin told Carbon Brief. He added that IIFB supports funding being allocated directly to IPLCs and said the subsidiary body on Article 8(j) would have to discuss how to manage the flow of funding to Indigenous peoples.

The final DSI text that was adopted said that “at least half of the funding of the global fund should support the self-identified needs” of IPLCs, “where appropriate and subject to national circumstances”. (See: Digital sequence information.)

Another of the issues pushed by IPLCs at COP16 was human rights.

Joji Carino, senior policy adviser at Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) in the Philippines, told a press conference that the implementation of the GBF requires respecting the rights of IPLCs, such as the rights to their lands and territories, equitable participation in decision-making and respect for traditional knowledge.

During a conference on Indigenous peoples’ land rights, Luz Enith Mosquera, from the technical team of the Chocó Solidarity Interethnic Forum in Colombia, stressed the strong connection Indigenous peoples have with their territories: 

“The forests, rivers, and jungles are environments with which we coexist; they are not mere objects to be dominated. We are part of the forest. The titled territories are preserved because the communities maintain a balanced relationship with the land.” 

Mosquera told Carbon Brief that in the department of Chocó, collective territories are legally granted to Afro-descendant communities. However, there are still areas that lack legal titles and do not have community councils or collective safeguards. She told Carbon Brief:

“The absence of collective titling creates a legal vacuum that could allow outsiders to exploit these territories. Therefore, there is an urgent need for the titling, extension and regulation of the land and the communities”.

A separate COP16 decision concerned the recognition of Afro-descendant peoples. 

It called on parties to incorporate the “contributions of people of African descent” and their knowledge of and connection to their lands in the implementation of the CBD and the GBF. It also “encourages” parties to “facilitate their full and effective participation” in both international agreements.

The decision also “encourages” parties, other countries and organisations to provide financial support and capacity-building for Afro-descendant peoples on a voluntary basis. It further encourages parties to communicate in their NBSAPs the contributions of Afro-descendant peoples to the implementation of the CBD and the GBF.

The text on Afro-descendant peoples was pushed strongly by Colombia and Brazil, but opposed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which argued there is a lack of evidence backing the contribution of these peoples to implementing the GBF.

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Biodiversity and climate change

Forging closer links between action on climate change and biodiversity loss was a key priority of the Colombian COP16 presidency.

The presidency dedicated a high-level ministerial meeting to the “synergies between biodiversity and climate change” at the conference, describing them as “inseparable challenges” in a concept note. (See Carbon Brief’s explainer on how biodiversity loss and climate change are connected.)

COP16 president and Colombian environment minister Susana Muhamad was keen to stress that the Cali summit should be viewed as a stepping stone to the COP30 climate summit, which is to be held in Belém, a city in the Brazilian Amazon, in 2025. (The COP29 climate summit is being held in Azerbaijan later this month.)

One lead negotiator told Carbon Brief that the Colombian COP16 presidency was “already working closely” with the Brazilian COP30 presidency to ensure “nature is at the heart” of next year’s climate talks.

However, despite the high-level focus, negotiations in Cali for a new decision text on biodiversity and climate change were fraught.

During COP16’s final plenary session on Saturday morning, countries adopted the biodiversity and climate change text after several last-minute changes.

The text “recognises” that biodiversity loss and climate change are “interdependent” issues that “need to be addressed urgently and in a coherent and balanced manner”.

The text also “requests” that CBD executive secretary, Astrid Schomaker, gather views by May 2025 on a “potential joint work programme of the Rio conventions”. (The Rio conventions refer to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC); the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD); and the Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).)

If this work programme goes ahead, it could be key to seeing countries take more joined up action on climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification, observers said.

However, as Climate Home News reported, an early suggestion from Colombia to reference the global commitment to transition away from fossil fuels agreed at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai was quickly disregarded by other parties and did not appear in later drafts.

During the ministerial meeting on biodiversity and climate change, which came after Colombia’s suggestion was rejected, Muhamad “lamented that, during negotiations, parties have not been advancing on the topic” of linking the two crises, according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

She told other ministers that climate change and biodiversity loss are “two sides of the same coin”, but that parties often treat them as “two different coins”.

Carbon Brief understands that much of the negotiating time for the biodiversity and climate change decision text was taken up by the potential issue of financial “double counting”.

That is, some developing nations raised concerns that tying biodiversity and climate change closer together might lead to developed nations more often labelling new funds as both “climate” and “biodiversity” finance, potentially reducing the already limited pool of funding available for addressing either problem.

A version of the decision from 30 October has bracketed text that “urges” parties to mobilise resources with “a view to avoiding double counting and enhancing transparency”.

However, the final text does not mention double counting at all.

Another issue that proved contentious in the biodiversity and climate change negotiations was “geoengineering”, defined in the context of the CBD as large-scale methods for addressing climate impacts by either removing CO2 from the atmosphere or reflecting more sunlight away from the Earth. (The CBD definition excludes carbon capture and storage from fossil-fuel plants.)

Back in 2010, parties agreed to a de facto moratorium on geoengineering, which was reaffirmed at COP13 in 2016. (This moratorium has not stopped small-scale CO2 removal or solar geoengineering projects from taking place.)

Early on in the summit, a group of Pacific island nations, represented by Palau, suggested that the text should “urge” parties to “to prevent solar and marine geoengineering field experiments that could impact” biodiversity or Indigenous communities.

A version of the text from near the end of the summit on 1 November does not urge parties to take any kind of action on geoengineering.

However, it contains bracketed text that “recognises” that “marine and solar geoengineering activities could result in serious and irreversible impacts on biodiversity and the

livelihoods of Indigenous peoples and local communities”.

Carbon Brief understands that this section of bracketed text was dropped in the final plenary session in a bid to find consensus.

An early version of the draft text also “stressed” that the “large-scale deployment of intensive bioenergy plantations” – a requirement of many climate scenarios that rely on a CO2-removal technology called bioenergy, carbon capture and storage (BECCS) – “will likely have negative impacts on biodiversity”. However, later drafts do not reference bioenergy.

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Mainstreaming biodiversity

Another item on the agenda at COP16 was “mainstreaming biodiversity”. This term refers to actions that seek to ensure that biodiversity is considered in any policies and practices that could have a negative effect on it.

This could include, for example, ensuring biodiversity is included in planning rules for new project developments or in agricultural guidelines.

Linda Krueger, global lead for biodiversity and infrastructure policy at the Nature Conservancy, an NGO which campaigns for mainstreaming biodiversity, explained to Carbon Brief:

“It’s how we feed ourselves; it’s how we clothe ourselves; it’s where we build our houses and drive our cars. We have to figure out how to improve those practices in all of those sectors.”

COP16 saw the launch of a “mainstreaming champions” group of nations, led by Mexico and COP16 host Colombia.

As of 1 November, the group had 17 members, with the host countries joined by Belgium, Canada, Chile, Costa Rica, Fiji, Finland, France, Georgia, Germany, Mauritania, Peru, Portugal, South Africa, Spain and, “tentatively”, Zambia.

According to a press release announcing the new alliance, its “key priorities” will be “accelerating collective action and impact”, “collaboration and mutual learning” and “engagement designed to maintain momentum through 2030”.

Colombia has “worked a lot on its environmental-licensing processes” for new projects to “make it mandatory for companies to address their impacts”, Krueger said, making the nation an apt co-host of the alliance.

During the negotiations, parties also agreed to a new decision text on mainstreaming biodiversity.

The text “reiterates” the “critical importance of mainstreaming biodiversity across the whole of government and the whole of society” in order to achieve biodiversity goals. 

However, it offers little new in terms of what countries should do to ensure mainstreaming happens, according to Krueger.

“In terms of what it obligates countries to do, there’s frankly not a lot new there,” she told Carbon Brief.

The text “invites” countries “to provide relevant information…on biodiversity mainstreaming through their seventh national reports”, which are due in February 2026. (In UN speak, “invites” is not particularly binding.)

It also “requests” that the CBD executive secretary, Astrid Schomaker, take various actions around mainstreaming biodiversity, including “identifying challenges and scientific, technical and technological gaps that may undermine countries’ capacity to support mainstreaming”.

This section could be key to “helping to keep the mainstreaming agenda on the front burner”, Krueger said.

Despite not including many new actions for parties to take, the negotiations on the mainstreaming biodiversity text were long and tense, Carbon Brief understands, with Brazil, Russia and Japan among the countries to make lengthy interjections.

Though not stated explicitly, the ferocity of negotiations could reflect countries’ nervousness about actions that might require businesses to change their practices to be more friendly to biodiversity, observers told Carbon Brief.

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Synthetic biology

Synthetic biology refers to developments in biotechnology that can change genetic materials, living organisms and biological systems. These include gene drives, where genetics of species are altered to try and disrupt certain genes in a population. This could target malaria-carrying mosquitos, for example, to help eradicate the spread of disease.  

At COP16, countries agreed to work towards developing a “thematic action plan” to support capacity building and information sharing around these biotechnology developments. This decision was given the green light in the early hours of Saturday 2 November, with no last-minute interjections from countries. 

The crux of Cali discussions on this topic centred on the focus of future talks on synthetic biology and also who would carry out these discussions. 

Dr Marja Ruohonen-Lehto, the Finnish co-chair of the synthetic biology contact group at COP16, said countries showed “strong support and agreement” on developing an action plan. She told Carbon Brief midway through the summit: 

“However, what we would see and prioritise as future work, it was less easy to see what the way forward would be – both what we would do in the future in relation to synthetic biology and who would do that work.”

The agreed text emphasised the “urgent need” for capacity building and technology transfers on synthetic biology, especially for developing countries. An ad-hoc technical expert group will be set up to continue discussions. 

This group will identify the “current and potential benefits” of synthetic biology and the “potential negative impacts” of recent technology developments in this area.

The agreed document also requested that the CBD executive secretary submit a draft of the action plan, “with a view” for countries to consider this draft at the next UN biodiversity summit in 2026. 

Dr Eva Sirinathsinghji, a biosafety research associate at thinktank Third World Network, said the final text provided a “more balanced version of outcomes” than other versions of the decision. 

She told Carbon Brief that it is important to “not just assess potential benefits, but also risks [and] claims” around synthetic biology. 

Dr Samantha O’Loughlin is a population geneticist at Imperial College London who followed the synthetic biology talks at COP16. 

She noted that assessing these technologies is “quite an expensive process”. Countries want more funding to allow them to “assess [the technologies] for themselves…rather than having some huge, global process going on which is very broad and doesn’t really address issues country-by-country”, she told Carbon Brief, adding:

“Part of the issue is around where we should be putting our efforts and resources now. So a lot of parties, especially from South America and Africa, would really like to see money and resources go into capacity building.”

This would allow them to improve research and provide more regulation and risk assessments of synthetic biology, she noted.

Ruohonen-Lehto said the contact group talks were “constructive”, but added: 

“It is clear that we have different views and the way forward in cases when there are different views is never easy. It’s always a somewhat difficult process.” 

Before the summit, countries including Brazil, New Zealand and Chile did not support plans to extend the mandate of the expert working group on synthetic biology, according to Carbon Brief’s tracker on key negotiating issues. 

Sirinathsinghji said the final outcome of this decision “focused more heavily on capacity building than assessment” and believed there was an “imbalance” in deciding to assess “benefits over risks”. 

However, she noted these discussions will continue in future CBD negotiations. 

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Biodiversity and health

Biodiversity loss is linked in many different ways to the health of people, wildlife and ecosystems. 

Robust ecosystems and species diversity benefit the production of food, clean water, medicine and other essentials for good health.

At COP16, following four years of negotiations, countries agreed a new voluntary action plan highlighting the links between biodiversity and health.

The plan, which was broadly supported by countries and NGOs ahead of the final negotiations, is intended to support governments and other stakeholders to better focus on health and biodiversity in their policies, strategies and programmes. 

It outlined a number of voluntary actions on issues such as pollution, climate change and agriculture, plus detailed how they are relevant to the aims of the GBF. These include: 

• Integrating the “consideration” of the links between climate change, biodiversity and health into national policy and planning rules. 
• Reducing the “negative impacts on biodiversity and health” from agriculture and other sectors by boosting “sustainable practices”, such as “sustainable intensification” and “integrated pest management”. 
• Developing ways to better understand the links between chemicals, waste and human health impacts. 

Dr Susan Lieberman, the vice-president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society, said that the plan also gives policymakers a toolbox to address issues feeding into pandemic risks. 

The final agreement said it drew on “lessons learned” from the Covid-19 pandemic and other emerging diseases, “which have further highlighted the importance of the relationship between health and well-being and biodiversity”.

Dr Colman O’Criodain, the head of biodiversity policy at WWF International, told Carbon Brief that years of discussions on biodiversity and health at the CBD got a “boost” during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

There has been a “growing realisation” about habitat loss and other issues being a “major trigger” for disease outbreaks, he said, adding: 

“The plan basically acknowledges the risk that habitat fragmentation and habitat loss has [for] bad health outcomes.”

A study published earlier this year found that biodiversity loss drives the spread of infectious disease. Another study found that climate change is increasingly driving new encounters between mammal species, raising the risk of the spread of disease.

Lieberman told Carbon Brief that, while no countries outright tried to prevent the plan from being adopted, some elements were “watered down” in negotiations. She told Carbon Brief: 

“Some countries with large conversion of tropical forest for livestock production don’t want that reflected in the action.” 

For example, an earlier draft recognised that “several human-mediated factors are most likely driving the emergence of zoonotic diseases”. 

These factors included “increasing human demand for animal protein”, “unsustainable agricultural intensification” and “land-use change and extractive industries”.

The language on this issue was shortened and softened in the final text to read: 

“Emerging infectious diseases in wildlife, domestic animals, plants or people can be exacerbated by human activities, such as unsustainable land-use change practices and habitat fragmentation.”

Lieberman noted: 

“The science is clear. Clearing a forest, disrupting ecologically intact forests, intact ecosystems and wildlife trade and trafficking, increases the risk of pathogen spillover [from one species to another]. They didn’t want to say that. They want to say human impact may increase the risk. But the science is clear.”

Negotiations on the action plan took place in a contact group. By 24 October, a draft with just 15 brackets was submitted to the CBD – a drop from 53 brackets in a previous version of the text. 

The final text of the agreement was adopted by the COP16 plenary on 2 November. O’Criodain told Carbon Brief:

“At the end of the day, this plan is only going to be voluntary, but it’s still good guidance. Even if countries that don’t commit formally to implement it use the guidance and take the parts of it that are relevant to them, that’s still a good thing.”

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Marine and coastal biodiversity

COP16 produced two texts under the “marine and coastal biodiversity” agenda item: one on ecologically or biologically significant marine areas, or “EBSAs”; and one on the conservation and sustainable use of marine, coastal and island biodiversity.

The text “recognises” that the identification of EBSAs “can make a crucial contribution to the implementation” of the GBF, but adds that the process “is strictly a scientific and technical exercise…and does not have economic or legal implications”. 

Importantly, the existence of an EBSA does not imply any level of protection for those waters – although it can help governments identify areas that may be best-suited for turning into marine protected areas (MPAs).

The EBSA decision includes guidance on both identifying and modifying the descriptions of such areas – allowing the revision of existing areas as new scientific information comes to light.

Areas within national waters can only be described or modified by the country with sovereignty over those waters, while any states “individually or collectively, including through competent intergovernmental organisations” can do so for areas beyond national jurisdiction (the “high seas”). 

The decision also allows for the withdrawal of descriptions “owing to the existence of a claim or dispute relating to sovereignty, sovereign rights or jurisdiction”.

The decision also “requests” that the CBD “develop voluntary guidelines on peer-review processes for the description” of EBSAs. 

The approval of the EBSAs document was reportedly met with cheers by negotiators, who have spent eight years working towards a decision on the topic. 

Andreas Hansen, director of global ocean policy at the Nature Conservancy, told Carbon Brief:

“There was an initial wave of description of these really important areas, and then there was disagreement on how to update it and to actually keep the science up to date. And now, with this decision – which hopefully will be agreed – we’ll be back to getting the best science on the table to lay the foundation for marine protected areas or sustainable use measures or whatever countries deem appropriate.”

The decision “requests” a review of the effectiveness of its implementation in 10 years, which is to be reviewed at that time by the SBSTTA.

The other text, on conservation and sustainable use, identifies topics where the CBD Secretariat can guide countries on their implementation of the GBF.

That decision “welcomes” the adoption of the “High Seas Treaty”, which was “an important priority” for observer groups, Masha Kalinina, senior officer at the Pew Charitable Trusts, told Carbon Brief. She added:

“We support all links to the High Seas Treaty, because we can’t reach target three [30 by 30] without eventually protected areas in the high seas.”

Other conventions recognised in the text are the International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments, the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matters and the ongoing discussions on a plastics treaty. Hansen told Carbon Brief:

“That goes to a general challenge around ocean governance and how many different treaties and bodies there are…So that text that explicitly gives the Secretariat the encouragement to reach out and do that collaborative work [with other bodies and Conventions] is really important from our point of view.”

The conservation and sustainable use decision also includes an annex, which contains “gaps and areas in need of additional focus”. These gaps include effective implementation of marine protected areas, deep-sea ecosystems, the effects of pollution and traditional knowledge of marine and coastal biodiversity. 

Items that remained bracketed in the annex that was forwarded to the plenary included phrasing around the use of nature-based solutions, geoengineering activities “that may have impacts on marine and coastal biodiversity”, harmful fishing subsidies and the use of DSI. 

The negotiations on marine geoengineering were “a bit of a mix”, Jehki Härkönen, senior policy advisor with Greenpeace International, told Carbon Brief. 

The text was originally marked for deletion by the secretariat due to the existence of previous decisions on marine geoengineering. Härkönen said that “some countries [are] not necessarily wanting more regulation on marine geoengineering, but also there [has been] a bit of a discussion around where it should be regulated”.

However, he added, “currently there is no body that would comprehensively regulate marine geoengineering”.

The final text included a call for “further efforts” on “enhanc[ing] the use of nature-based solutions”, “improv[ing] the understanding of the impacts of geoengineering” and taking measures to ensure the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from the use of DSI.
Discussion of subsidies in the final text was limited to a single footnote, which recalled the Agreement on Fisheries Subsidies under the World Trade Organization.

Observers were generally pleased with the summit’s outcomes on marine and coastal biodiversity. Hansen told Carbon Brief:

“Overall, we are happy with good action now, and prefer that over slightly better action in two years time.”

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Links with other bodies

The links between the Convention on Biological Diversity and other organisations was frequently highlighted throughout the two weeks of talks in Cali. At the end of COP16, countries agreed on a document acknowledging and recognising these ties. 

Some links focus on the three Rio Conventions – the three UN treaties under which countries meet separately to negotiate on climate change, biodiversity and desertification. 

All three of these COPs are taking place within the span of just two months this year. COP16 was the first and will be followed by the UN climate summit COP29 later this month in Baku, Azerbaijan. 

The desertification summit – also called COP16  – will take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in December. 

The final COP16 cooperation decision “invites” countries to “strengthen synergies and cooperation in the implementation of each convention, in accordance with national circumstances and priorities”. The decision also welcomed the outcomes of the previous UN climate summit, COP28.

In September, the executive secretaries of the three conventions behind these summits said that climate change, land degradation and biodiversity must be tackled “in an integrated way”. In a joint opinion article for the World Economic Forum, they wrote: 

“The current ways of doing things are simply not working. We cannot tackle these issues in isolation. Climate change is not just about carbon emissions. Land degradation is not just about soil. Biodiversity loss is not just about endangered species. These issues are part of a much larger, more complex puzzle.” 

Colombia could send a unified plan to the three COPs instead of separate submissions in future, COP16 president Susana Muhamad told Reuters in October. 

Speaking at a side event on 23 October, CBD executive secretary Astrid Schomaker said that synergies lead to “greater effectiveness and greater efficiency”, particularly for countries with lower capacities. 

She noted that discussions on this issue are “much wider” than just links between the three COPs. 

The final cooperation text also referenced outcomes from the UN Environment Programme, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Health Organization, among others. 

At working group discussions on 25 October, the EU, Cameroon and Australia wanted to reference the global treaty on governing the sustainable use and conservation of the high seas (the “High Seas Treaty”) in the text, according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.
This agreement on biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction (BBNJ) was signed off last year. It has so far been ratified by 14 countries.

Speaking at a 23 October side event, Amy Fraenkel, the executive secretary of the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals, said that many GBF targets are also “extremely relevant” to her work.

Joseph Appiott, a coordinator on ocean issues at the CBD, noted at the event that the interactions between conventions “don’t mean anything unless we translate them into action on the ground”. 

In the final cooperation decision, the CBD executive secretary was asked to report on cooperation progress at discussions held before the next UN biodiversity summit in 2026. 

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Invasive alien species

Invasive species are one of the five main drivers of biodiversity loss and are covered under target 6 of the GBF. 

Discussions on invasive species – as well as best practices for their prevention and control – have featured on the COP agenda for many years. 

At COP16, parties discussed a text on invasive alien species (IAS) that covered a range of topics, including linkages between invasive species and climate change, and suggested actions for the prediction, prevention and management of IAS. 

The text combines elements and guidance from the work of an ad-hoc technical expert group on IAS and a major report released last year by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

Although the IAS agenda item pre-dates the IPBES assessment on the topic, the decision “was enriched” by the assessment, Prof Aníbal Pauchard, an ecologist at the University of Concepción in Chile, told Carbon Brief. Pauchard, who co-chaired the assessment, added that “although our report wasn’t written for target 6, it’s very instrumental” to parties being able to achieve that target.

(For more on the links between invasive alien species and climate change, see Carbon Brief’s coverage of the IPBES assessment.)

Dr Colman O’Criodain, WWF’s lead expert on wildlife trade, told Carbon Brief:

“It’s been a painful process [leading up to the decision], but there’s never been fundamental divisions of principle like there have been on some other issues here. [It’s] more on points of detail.”

Observers told Carbon Brief that, in Cali, there was little disagreement as to the technical content of the decision. Rather, the main sticking point was a political one. 

The major point of divergence remaining as the summit headed into the second week was whether to “welcome” or simply “note” the results of the IPBES assessment. As reported by the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, this disagreement stemmed from Russia’s objection that some of the underlying databases were not accessible in their country due to international sanctions.

The EU contends that Russia’s accessibility was a technical glitch and that it has since been resolved, according to O’Criodain.

Dr David Obura, IPBES chair, told Carbon Brief:

“We would like the assessment to be welcomed, because then that encourages countries to really use the results. And it does make a difference, the language that is used, so we’re hoping that that can be resolved in the final negotiations.”

On future work on invasive species at the CBD, O’Criodain told Carbon Brief: 

“There will be further discussion – perhaps not at the next COP, but this [agenda item] has come back a few times, and I’m sure it will come back again.”

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Capacity-building and knowledge management

At COP15, parties agreed on a mechanism to facilitate cooperation among parties and relevant organisations for implementing the GBF. 

Enabling the effective utilisation of science, technology and innovation is embedded in target 20 of the GBF, which refers to the strengthening of capacity-building and cooperation for implementing the framework.

The mechanism will operate through a network of subregional technical and scientific cooperation support centres – housed at existing organisations and research institutes – that are integrated by a “global coordination entity”. 

These centres were created under a COP15 decision on capacity-building and development, which “decide[d] to establish a mechanism comprising a network of regional, and/or additional subregional technical and scientific cooperation support centres”.

Under the COP15 decision, an “informal advisory group on technical and scientific cooperation” was convened to consider the candidates to host the regional support centres.

At its fourth meeting, the Subsidiary Body on Implementation approved the selection of five support centres in Africa, three in the Americas, five in Asia, four in Europe and one in Oceania.

During a COP16 side event, Erie Tamale, a senior programme management officer at the UN Environment Programme and head of the “capacity-building and knowledge management unit” at the CBD secretariat, explained that the global coordination entity will provide support to the regional centres by facilitating the exchange of good practices, resources, financial flows, technology and human resources within each region. 

According to Tamale, the global coordination entity will compile the reports of all 18 centres and send them to the CBD’s Subsidiary Body on Implementation, which will channel the information to the COP. At the final stage of COP16, parties decided that the CBD secretariat will host and run this coordination body.

Tamale said that the regional centres will work directly with the parties, although they are not expected to support them in the implementation of all 23 targets of the GBF due to capacity limitations. He added:

“I don’t think we have that level of expertise and resources. Once [a cooperation] request comes into the centre, the idea is that the centre identifies within the subregion if there’s an entity that has the capacity or expertise to help the party. If not, they will reach out to the global [coordination] entity [to] find the resource wherever it will be located, to support the party.” 

On the financial resources needed to enact the support centres, Tamale noted that the CBD secretariat has already submitted a proposal to the Kunming Biodiversity Fund (KBF) to channel resources to the centres to support their work, but parties are also encouraged to directly apply for funds from the KBF.

At the summit, Mirna Inés Fernández, a researcher at the Third World Network, told Carbon Brief that the mechanisms of scientific and technological cooperation “come with very little financial support”.

For Fernández, the creation of the mechanism does not make sense if it is not accompanied by financial resources for the regional centres, so they can support not only governments, but also other stakeholders recognised within the GBF, such as IPLCs, women and youth.

She stressed that COP has not yet broadened the scope of the discussions around the inclusion of all the local non-governmental organisations in operationalising the support centres and capacity-building. Fernández told Carbon Brief:

“There are many civil-society groups and NGOs that work directly with local Indigenous communities, with youth and women. If they could somehow ally or establish alliances with the regional centres to be their arms and reach out to more sectors of society, it would be extremely important, and that is what we are proposing.”

COP16 also delivered a draft decision on capacity-building and development that, among other things, encourages parties to share information on their capacity-building and activities for implementing the GBF through the CBD clearing house mechanism (CHM). The CHM promotes cooperation, information sharing and knowledge exchange.

Parties at the COP16 also agreed to a draft decision on knowledge management, which includes a programme of work to implement the CHM between 2024 and 2030. 

Knowledge management also figures in target 21 of the GBF, which aims to ensure access to information and knowledge for biodiversity conservation.

During the negotiations, parties agreed on “language [within the decision on capacity-building] to encourage north-south, south-south and triangular cooperation, and agreed to language regarding adoption of the annexed knowledge management strategy”, according to the Earth Negotiations Bulletin.

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Sustainable wildlife management

One of the main drivers of biodiversity loss is the overexploitation of resources and nature.

But, at the same time, people worldwide rely on nature for their livelihoods.

During a protest in the second week of COP16 to showcase support for environmental defenders who conserve biodiversity, Txai Suruí, an Indigenous leader of the Paite Suruí people in the Brazilian Amazon, told Carbon Brief how her community preserves wild species:

“In the forest, the animals need the trees, the trees need the animals and we also need them to live. In my land we have everything: macaws, monkeys, fish, tapirs, agouti, jaguar, armadillos, all kinds of birds. We work with biomonitoring to protect our land, but we also analyse the fauna and flora and how [they are] being affected by the climate emergency”.

The COP16 decision on sustainable wildlife management encourages parties at all levels, IPLCs, women and youth to consider seven suggested policy actions – for example, the inclusion of diverse forms of knowledge – and recognises the need to scale up funding for the monitoring of wild species. 

The decision encourages the “full and effective participation” of IPLCs, women, youth and persons with disabilities in the decision-making around wildlife use and management. It also encourages the incorporation of monitoring frameworks and indicators on this subject, as well as the promotion of incentives for conservation and sustainable use of wildlife, including innovative financial solutions. 

María Inés Rivadeneira, WWF policy coordinator for Latin America and the Caribbean, told Carbon Brief:

“The document reflects quite well the recommendations of the [CBD] scientific subsidiary body. It is progress, the recognition of these recommendations. In that sense, it seems to be an appropriate document.”

Rivadeneira noted that the document encourages the creation of monitoring indicators of wildlife management, although they are not binding and the methods that countries will follow to fulfil their indicators are not yet established. Her organisation, she added, calls for countries to establish headline indicators on sustainable wildlife management.

During a press briefing held by the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity (IIFB,) Joji Carino, senior policy adviser at Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) in the Philippines, said that there is a programme of work on customer sustainable use that parties have already adopted after Aichi targets, and mandates them to support it in their NBSAPs. She said:

“On the ground, this means the revitalisation of our food systems because it’s through [them] that we sustain our livelihoods, there’s intergenerational transfer [of] knowledge from elders to young, [and] we’re able to keep genetic diversity in culturally important species for food but also animals.”

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Other matters

Liability and redress

At COP16, countries adopted two decisions on liability and redress for cross-border ecological and biological harms – one each under the COP and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety.

Liability and redress for damage to biological diversity falls under Article 14.2 of the UN CBD and was one of the major themes when the convention itself was being negotiated. At the time, countries could not reach a consensus on sticky questions around accountability, compensation and restoring damage.

In 2010, countries agreed on the Nagoya-Kuala Lumpur Supplementary Protocol on Liability and Redress, designed to prevent harms to biodiversity from the movement of living modified organisms across borders. 

The Cartagena Protocol decision noted the limited ratification of the supplementary protocol “with regret” and reminded states to share information and set up an authority to identify, evaluate and respond to damages.

The COP16 decision included an agreement “to review the topic of liability and redress in the context of Article 14, paragraph 2” at COP18.

In September this year, the CBD secretariat published an information note, citing international developments, such as the new loss-and-damage fund, rising climate attribution and litigation and a global discussion on “ecocide”.

According to Anna Maddrick, climate law adviser to the permanent mission of Vanuatu, the lack of legally binding targets has been “a major challenge” in biodiversity law. She told Carbon Brief:

“Vanuatu’s proposal of an independent crime of ecocide to the International Criminal Court underlines a commitment to making environmental protection enforceable and is well placed to support the CBD’s implementation, especially on liability and redress.” 

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Scientific and technical needs

Agenda item 16 at COP16 addressed the scientific and technical needs to support parties in their implementation of the GBF.

The decision text highlights a few areas of work where advancement could be made, including biodiversity-inclusive spatial planning, pollution and biodiversity and sustainable biodiversity-based activities. 

The COP16 decision also “welcom[es] the establishment” of regional scientific and technical support centres.

These centres were created under a COP15 decision on capacity-building and development, which “decide[d] to establish a mechanism comprising a network of regional, and/or additional subregional technical and scientific cooperation support centres”.

Under the COP15 decision, an “informal advisory group on technical and scientific cooperation” was convened to consider the candidates to host the regional support centres.

At its fourth meeting, the Subsidiary Body on Implementation approved the selection of five support centres in Africa, three in the Americas, five in Asia, four in Europe and one in Oceania.

These support centres will be housed at existing organisations and research institutes, including the South African National Biodiversity Institute, the Nanjing Institute of Environmental Sciences and the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme.

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IPBES

The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) provides scientific, technical and policy support to countries on biodiversity and the interactions between humans and nature.

It functions in much the same way that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does with the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

COP16 produced a draft text on “matters related to the work programme” of IPBES. It “encourages” parties to “make use of, as appropriate, the assessments and deliverables” of IPBES. 

It also “invites” IPBES to consider a range of options for a future assessment, including a bracketed option on “rights-based approaches”. 

The decision text that was ultimately adopted did not include the final report option. IPBES will consider the recommendations at its plenary meeting in Namibia in December and, in conjunction with other consultations and inputs over the next year, identify a topic at its plenary in 2025.

Obura, the IPBES chair, told Carbon Brief:

“From the IPBES perspective, what we like is that we’re being asked to do stuff and parties consider it important.”

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Plant conservation

At COP16, countries adopted a set of voluntary actions to help countries meet plant conservation goals in line with the GBF. 

For example, to meet the aim to protect 30% of the world’s land and water, suggested actions include developing “integrated management plans” for areas important for plant diversity to ensure that they are well monitored and protected. 

China Williams, a senior science officer at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, said that the actions help to “translate” the GBF into a “blueprint” for the plant community. She told Carbon Brief: 

“The whole GBF is kind of enormous. If you’re on the ground working in a botanic garden in the UK or Ireland or Cameroon, it’s difficult to know where to start. So this gives you a very concrete [starting point].” 

Few tweaks were made to the text during COP16. On 25 October, countries agreed to add language specifying support for developing countries and others after an intervention from Bangladesh in a plenary midway through the talks, the Earth Negotiations Bulletin reported. 

In terms of next steps on plant conservation, Williams said: 

“It will be down to the plant community to get on with using this as a blueprint for getting on with the job by 2030.” 

Also at COP16, the UK and Chile proposed that the CBD introduce a “fungal conservation pledge” to better prioritise fungi in global conservation strategies. The pledge was launched at a side event on 30 October, near the end of the summit. 

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Communication and education

Communication, education and public awareness under the CBD are addressed via an informal advisory committee that currently has a mandate to continue its work through to 2030. 

The COP16 decision on this agenda item acknowledges that “despite progress in communication and public awareness, insufficient work has been undertaken” towards strengthening education in service of achieving the objectives of the GBF.

The text “encourages” countries to “develop and implement actions at the national level” to align their efforts under the programme of work on communication with the GBF “in accordance with national circumstances and priorities”.

An annex to the decision specifies potential actions for the CBD secretariat, parties and other stakeholders to take in order to achieve alignment. These include “reinforc[ing] mutual messages” in collaboration with other intergovernmental bodies, developing national communications plans around the GBF and promoting “examples of science and technology that contribute to better biodiversity outcomes”.

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Diverse values of biodiversity

The agenda item on “diverse values of biodiversity” was in reference to ongoing work countries are doing to set out all the ways in which nature has value.

According to the CBD, nature should not only be appreciated in economic terms, but also for its “intrinsic” value. Other types of value related to nature include “ecological, genetic, scientific, educational, cultural, recreational and aesthetic”.

In July 2022, IPBES, the scientific advisory panel to the CBD, produced a “methodological assessment” on valuing biodiversity. 

This report found that the causes of biodiversity loss are “tightly linked” to the ways in which nature is valued. Namely, global policies to date have led to nature being viewed for its “short-term economic” value, which has led to its “unsustainable use”, according to the assessment.

This “narrow” view of nature has also neglected the traditional knowledge and practices of Indigenous peoples, it added, concluding:

“Transformative change needed to address the global biodiversity crisis relies on shifting away from predominant values that currently over-emphasise short term and individual material gains, to nurturing sustainability-aligned values across society.”

At COP16, parties negotiated a new text formally recognising and responding to this assessment.

The text “welcomes” the findings and “encourages” parties to take a number of actions in response. (In UN speak, “encourages” is not particularly binding.)

Parties are encouraged to “address the diverse values of nature in ongoing and new valuation processes, including as part of ecosystem assessments” and to “meaningfully” incorporate the diverse values of nature into decision making.

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Around the COP

Colombian presidency

Colombia’s hosting of COP16 was widely celebrated due to the country’s leadership on biodiversity and climate issues and for Susana Muhamad’s selection as summit president. 

The fourth-largest South America country, Colombia is one of the most biodiverse parts of the world and has the highest bird diversity, with more than 2,000 species recorded. 

COP16 was originally due to be held in Turkey, but the country withdrew as host in July 2023 after the devastating earthquakes of February 2023, which killed more than 50,000 people. 

Colombia was confirmed as the new host last December. Dr David Cooper, the then-acting executive secretary of the CBD, told Carbon Brief at the time that it was “exciting” to hold the conference in a “megadiverse country” with “very strong Indigenous peoples’ organisations [and] a very strong scientific base”. 

Speaking to Carbon Brief two weeks before COP16, the CBD’s new executive secretary Astrid Schomaker added that Colombia has taken “leadership on biodiversity issues for many years”. She said: 

“I think Colombia is an excellent host. They’ve made a lot of efforts to make this COP a success. And, in Susana Muhamad, we have a very knowledgeable and a very charismatic and very dedicated COP host. So I think the ingredients are in place for this to be a very good, successful COP.” 

Muhamad was a central figure in the talks, encouraging finance boosts and for countries to reach agreement on key issues. 

She told the summit’s opening ceremony that the “planet doesn’t have time to lose”. 

Le Monde described the minister as a “rising star of the environmental movement on the international scene”. She is the “Frida Kahlo of environmental geopolitics”, Oscar Soria, the director of thinktank the Common Initiative, told the Guardian. The outlet noted that Muhamad worked as a sustainability consultant with Shell before entering politics. 

The COP16 president spoke at events and media gatherings throughout the two-week summit. She told a mid-way press conference on 25 October that the negotiations were moving at a good pace, but divisions remained on key issues such as resource mobilisation. She added:  

“We have a COP that has a very constructive climate.”

Colombia launched a “peace with nature coalition” at the summit on 29 October, a declaration calling for greater protection of biodiversity. 

As of publication, more than 120,000 people signed this declaration through campaign group Avaaz. It was also supported by countries including Mexico, Spain, Germany, Uruguay and Costa Rica. (See: World leaders.) 

The summit drew to a close abruptly – and prematurely – on 2 November, with minister Muhamad dropping the gavel at around 8.30am local time as there were not enough country representatives present to proceed.  

The final hours of the plenary drew criticism from delegations who had to leave to catch flights as the summit ran more than 14 hours into overtime. (This was the longest a CBD COP has over run its scheduled end time.)

The sudden end to the talks “jeopardises the implementation” of the GBF, according to the director general of WWF International, Kirsten Schuijt. 

She noted in a statement that despite Colombia’s “valiant efforts” and the “tireless work” of negotiators, meeting 2030 nature ambitions could be “veering dangerously off track” due to the outstanding issues. Schuijt added: 

“Nobody should be okay with this – because it will impact us all.”  

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Accessibility and security

Cali was jam-packed with COP delegates. The CBD had been expecting 12,000-14,000 attendees, but more than 23,000 registered in the end. 

As a result of this surge, delegates faced sluggish internet connections inside the blue zone. Carbon Brief understands that both Uganda and the DRC complained about the poor wifi connection during formal negotiations on the first day of the summit.

Translation issues also plagued the summit. In negotiations on Article 8(j) on 30 October, translation services were abruptly cut, “forcing all speakers and listeners to proceed in English only”, according to the civil-society organisation Avaaz. Avaaz noted that, under the CBD process, contact groups are only held in English and said that the “lack of translation services is deeply disappointing”. 

Translation services also ended before the conclusion of the Working Group II meeting on the final day of the summit as parties tried to hammer out the final details on resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism.

Some documents put before the plenary for adoption had also not yet been translated into the other UN official languages, with the DRC raising the concern that it would be hard for them to adopt a decision that was not available in other languages. The representative said that they “would really like documents in the language we understand best”, but, ultimately, withdrew the complaint.

Additionally, countries with small delegations were unable to attend all of the talks, due to the number of agenda items that needed resolving within the two weeks. In an intervention on the first day, the DRC said:

“Is it possible to complete the processing of all these above-mentioned items in only 12 days, while keeping in mind the number of brackets in the different documents to be examined?”

Observers also expressed to Carbon Brief their belief that the agenda was too sprawling.

Many delegations rushed out of the final plenary to catch their flights, with the plenary hall visibly emptying out as the hours ticked by. Parties and observers expressed their frustration that the “big-ticket” items – DSI, finance and the monitoring framework – were left to the end of the plenary, when many parties were no longer present to provide consensus.

Attendees from Fiji and Panama told the hall that they were the only ones remaining from their delegations, with Fiji noting that they were the last remaining representative of the Pacific island nations.

At 8:09 am on Saturday, 2 November, Peru requested that the COP check whether the plenary still had quorum and the ability to take decisions, due to the mass exodus that had occurred over the previous hours. 

After the check, it was confirmed that the COP did not have a quorum any longer and the meeting was suspended.

In the run-up to the summit, security concerns were a major discussion point. Colombia will soon mark eight years since signing a peace agreement that ended half a century of conflict. Other peace talks with a rebel group remain in stasis. 

In July, a dissident rebel group threatened to disrupt the summit. This threat was withdrawn, but more followed from armed rebels “who control swathes of the Amazon”, the Financial Times reported. 

Colombian president Gustavo Petro said he was “nervous” about something “bad” happening at the start of the summit, Colombia’s El Heraldo newspaper reported on 18 October. 
Speaking at a press conference on 21 October, Cali’s mayor Alejandro Eder assured the safety of the summit and said that security was the first issue tackled in early hosting talks. Eder noted that COP

More than 10,000 police officers were stationed across the city during the summit and no security incidents were reported.

Elsewhere at the summit, multiple attendees told Carbon Brief their accommodation bookings were cancelled last-minute, leaving them scrambling for limited alternatives.  

Some delegates opted for “love motels” whose rooms featured “circular beds, ‘love machine’ chairs, dance poles and sex swings”, the Guardian and AFP reported. 

Outside the main negotiation area, the green zone at the summit, which usually hosts civil society, NGO and business events relating to nature, was also open to the general public – the first time that a green zone has not required pre-registration to access. Nearly 1 million people reportedly visited the green zone throughout the summit.

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World leaders

Presidents and prime ministers are typically not invited to attend UN biodiversity conferences. Aside from Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada, none were present at the last summit in Montreal.

But a small number of world leaders travelled to Cali for COP16. Six heads of state and approximately 110 ministers from around the world attended a high-level segment on 29-30 October. 

This included Colombian president Gustavo Petro, who spoke several times at the summit. 

At the COP16 launch ceremony, Petro said that a “great battle for life” is approaching. He later told the high-level segment that both COP16 and the COP30 climate talks, due to be held next year in Belém, Brazil, must be “decisive” and “turning points where we won’t continue doing the same thing”.

UN secretary general António Guterres told the high-level segment that “nature is life”, but there is a “war against it”. He added: 

“Biodiversity is humanity’s ally. We must move from plundering it to preserving it.” 

The leaders of Armenia, Ecuador, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti and Suriname also attended the summit. The president of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa, told the plenary: 

“Today we can change…I want to believe we can change and the world is not going to end.” 

David Choquehuanca Céspedes, the vice president of Bolivia, told the summit that “Eurocentrism, capitalism and modernity” are “putting the planet at risk and exacerbating poverty”. 

COP president Susana Muhamad said during the high-level segment that the attendance of world leaders “raises the level of political discussion that the COP on biodiversity has”, adding: 

“This is not minor, because this is no longer an issue for conservationists or ecologists or environmentalists, it is an issue that should be at the centre of public policy of governments and the world.”

More world leaders were due to attend COP16, Carbon Brief understands, but provisional numbers dwindled as the summit approached. 

Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva cancelled his planned attendance on Friday 25 October due to a head injury. The president also pulled out of a trip to Russia following an “accident at home that left him with a cut on the back of his head”, the Associated Press reported. 

Muhamad told a 23 September press briefing that newly inaugurated president of Mexico, Dr Claudia Sheinbaum, would attend the summit, but she was also not present in Cali. 

The ministers who attended mostly covered environment or climate briefs. However, some finance and foreign affairs ministers showed face and engaged in discussions. 

Palestine’s foreign-affairs minister, Riyad al-Maliki, and Colombia’s Muhamad set up an agreement on “environmental cooperation and capacity building” at the talks. Speaking in Cali, Al-Maliki said: 

“Colombia’s experience and knowledge will be essential to face the daily challenges we face in Palestine, particularly in the socio-environmental field.” 

During the high-level segment of the conference, dozens of notable political figures, businesses, scientists and civil society groups signed an open letter to Petro and Lula encouraging the COP-hosting countries to “champion bold action” in aligning nature protection, climate action and transforming food systems. 

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Protests and environmental defenders

Several protests took place at COP16 to urge delegates to address a range of demands. 

During the first weekend of the conference, a group of Indigenous peoples mobilised in support of their demands, including the creation of the subsidiary body.

On finance day, members of several civil society organisations held a protest to demand that biodiversity market mechanisms, such as biodiversity credits and offsets, no longer be promoted in the negotiations and in the GBF. (See: Private and innovative funding.)

Mirna Inés Fernández, a researcher at the Third World Network and a participant in the protest, told Carbon Brief that target 19 of the GBF specifies that innovative sources of finance must be sought. Biodiversity markets are listed under the potential sources of finance under target 19. 

However, for civil society organisations, these mechanisms are “like a new form of commodification of nature”, Fernández said. Instead, she and other civil-society groups support other financing mechanisms, such as direct access to funding for IPLCs.

Another protest featured Indigenous leaders demanding protection for environmental defenders – a prominent topic at the summit. 

Ahead of COP16, Colombia’s government held a meeting on “peace with nature” and environmental justice, which brought together more than 150 environmental leaders from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela.

During that event, a call for action for environmental defenders was presented. It compiled several demands for COP16, including the strengthening of protection mechanisms for environmental defenders, the recognition of the damage to the mental health of environmental leaders and the creation of mechanisms for women’s participation in environmental decision-making.

Latin America is the deadliest region in the world for environmental defenders, with 166 defenders murdered in 2023, according to the latest report by campaign group Global Witness. Colombia leads the list with 79 killings, followed by Brazil, with 25, and Mexico and Honduras, each with 18 killings. 

During a side event in the second week of negotiations, human-rights experts and Indigenous representatives spoke of the importance of linking the Escazú Agreement and the GBF to protect biodiversity and those who conserve it. (The Escazú Agreement is a legally binding treaty, in force since 2021, that mandates Latin American countries to ensure the protection of environmental defenders as well as public participation and access to information on environmental issues.)

Gustavo Alanís, a lawyer and president of the Mexican Centre for Environmental Law who was a panellist at that event, told Carbon Brief that Article 9 of the Escazú Agreement connects biodiversity with the protection of environmental defenders. He explained that this article is binding, meaning that states are required to ensure safety for these defenders, protect their right to life and freedom of expression and investigate and punish those who attack them.

Alanís emphasised the need for greater political will to direct the necessary policies, strategies and funding for effective protection mechanisms. He also noted a significant lack of global action in this area.

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Greenwashing and lobbying

With COP16 seeing countries tackle topics such as pesticides, agriculture and payments for the use of genetic information, it unsurprisingly attracted the attention of businesses and lobbying groups from a wide range of industries.

The investigative outlet DeSmog produced an in-depth summary of how businesses and lobbyists sought to influence negotiations at the summit, including an interactive map of who was present.

According to DeSmog, the summit was attended by representatives from the pesticide and biotechnology trade group CropLife International and Brazil’s Confederation of National Industry (CNI), which represents powerful Brazilian agri-interests and had explicitly said it would lobby for its members during COP16.

Other companies to send representatives to COP16 included the dairy giant Danone, fertiliser company Yara and pharmaceutical giant GSK.

Fossil-fuel companies such as ExxonMobil and Shell also sent representatives to the summit, DeSmog reported.

Another area of interest for businesses at the summit was biodiversity and carbon offsetting. 

Carbon offsetting involves an entity that emits greenhouse gases into the atmosphere paying for another entity to pollute less. For example, an airline in a developed country that wants to claim it is reducing its emissions can pay for a patch of rainforest to be protected in the Amazon. This – in theory – “cancels out” some of the airline’s pollution.

Biodiversity offsetting refers to conservation activities intended to compensate for the lasting impacts of development on species and ecosystems that persist even after other mitigation measures.

Both types of offsetting have, on the whole, failed to produce tangible benefits for tackling climate change or biodiversity loss, with scientists raising the alarm that they are often used as vehicles for greenwashing by companies.

In addition, a Carbon Brief investigation found that carbon-offsetting projects often have severe impacts for Indigenous peoples and local communities. 

Early on in the summit, the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits launched its framework for “high-integrity” principles for biodiversity markets, supported by France and the UK. (See: Private and innovative funding.)

The principles were dubbed “extremely problematic” by the Green Finance Observatory, a sustainable finance thinktank.

DeSmog reported that a representative of South Pole – the world’s largest carbon-offsetting trader, which was the focus of a major investigation by the New Yorker last year – was present at the summit. The staff member “spoke at a side event in Cali” and said that the company “plans to move into biodiversity credits”, according to DeSmog.

According to DeSmog, the summit was also attended by representatives from Verra, a carbon-offsetting standards agency that was at the centre of a Guardian investigation alleging that most of its forest credits are “worthless”. (Verra has responded by saying that the studies referenced in the Guardian’s reporting are incorrect.)

Elsewhere, the Financial Times reported that advocates of the term “nature-positive”, which is fast becoming a “corporate buzzword”, were hoping to see the concept gain traction at COP16. 

“Nature-positive” is generally considered to mean halting and reversing biodiversity loss, which is the mission countries set themselves to achieve in Montreal in 2022. 

However, researchers and environmental groups have concerns that a “lack of a global standard for measuring biodiversity means that companies could, intentionally or otherwise, manipulate data to present themselves as nature-positive without making substantial changes”, the FT said.

So far, the term “nature-positive” has not made it into any final negotiated texts at biodiversity summits.

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New science

A number of groups launched new or updated scientific reports on the sidelines of COP16. 

On 22 October, the Group on Earth Observations launched the Global Ecosystems Atlas, which it called “the first harmonised resource dedicated to mapping and monitoring all the world’s ecosystems”. 

In a press release, Astrid Schomaker, the CBD’s executive secretary, said: 

“The Global Ecosystems Atlas is the first intergovernmental effort to develop a collation of the best ecosystem data from countries and it will serve as a critical tool by providing high-quality, reliable data on ecosystems around the world.”

On 28 October, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) launched the latest update to the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 

The Red List update was widely covered by global media, including in South Africa, Australia, the UK and Japan.

The Red List update also included the Global Tree Assessment, the first such comprehensive look at the threatened status of tree species around the world – covering more than 80% of known species. It found that nearly 40% of tree species are at risk of extinction. 

The same day saw the release of the Protected Planet Report 2024, the world’s “first official review” towards the 30-by-30 target. 

It found that “global coverage of protected and conserved areas has now reached 17.6% of terrestrial and inland waters and 8.4% of marine and coastal areas”, noting that “this progress must be accelerated considerably if the target is to be fully met”. 

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This article was updated to clarify that the global review text negotiated at COP16 was not adopted before the summit’s abrupt end.