Everything you need to know about the ‘other’ COP

Biodiversity — it’s climate’s less glitzy twin in the unfolding environmental crisis. And just like climate, it has its own United Nations COP.
This year, COP16 is happening in the tropical city of Cali, Colombia, where from Monday thousands of government representatives, businesses and activists will gather for two weeks of negotiations, events and networking.
The ultimate goal of the COP (which stands for the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity) is to halt and reverse the rapid destruction of our planet’s biodiversity. This year, the focus is on raising the money needed to fund this mammoth task.
It comes two years after the last biodiversity COP in Montreal, where countries agreed on a landmark set of 23 goals known as the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. At the center of it was a commitment to restore 30 percent of the world’s degraded ecosystems by 2030.
Now, governments have to start implementing these objectives — and there is plenty of disagreement on where the money should come from.
“This COP is all about showing that we meant business, showing that this wasn’t just a set of empty promises,” said a U.K. government official.
The task is urgent. About 1 million species worldwide are threatened with extinction, according to scientists, who warn also that the average size of wild animals populations have decreased by 73 percent between 1970 and 2020. The Stockholm Resilience Center, meanwhile, lists biosphere integrity as one of the most drastically transgressed of the nine planetary boundaries.
Halting this trend is essential as healthy ecosystems play a key role in mitigating climate change, absorbing CO2 emissions, and providing essential services such as clean air and water, as well as food.
Human wealth also depends on it. Half of the world’s GDP is moderately or highly dependent on nature, according to the World Economic Forum. In the EU, 75 percent of European firms are dependent on one or more nature-related services, while 80 percent of Europe’s habitats are in poor shape.
Here are four areas to look out for.
To stop biodiversity loss, the world needs to invest at least $700 billion per year into conservation measures, according to experts — and closing this massive finance gap is at the heart of the COP16 talks.
Country delegates will be negotiating a strategy to mobilize financial resources from all sources, and a key tension point is whether a new financial vehicle should be created or if existing tools should be reinforced instead.
Developing countries championed the idea of creating a special global biodiversity fund back in 2022, arguing it would provide easier access to nature-specific funding. This was a deal-breaker for a number of African countries.
Rich countries weren’t keen, but they agreed to step up their financial contributions and to revisit the idea of a special fund at this year’s COP.
Hopes are low for African countries to get their way, especially as the European Union — one of the world’s biggest donors in nature finance — is still against the idea of a new financial vehicle. It argues that existing instruments, notably under the U.N.-backed Global Environment Facility, can be improved to benefit local communities directly.
COP16 will also be an opportunity to assess whether rich countries are on track to meet their commitment to double their direct development aid for biodiversity to developing nations to at least $20 billion annually by 2025 and increase it further to $30 billion by 2030.
A recent OECD report showed that global funding for biodiversity increased from $11.1 billion in 2021 to $15.4 billion in 2022. But the extra cash came largely through loans from development banks.
Negotiators will also try to agree on the details of a new mechanism to get companies to pay for using digital biodiversity data when manufacturing products like cosmetics, vaccines and biotechnologies. And the stakes are high as the mechanism could generate billions.
In 2022, after almost a decade of talks, countries approved the creation of a multilateral mechanism but now need to agree on the details of how it is going to work, who should pay and how much.
There is broad consensus that the private sector, because it is making a financial profit from using digital biodiversity data, should be the main contributor. But countries disagree on whether this contribution should remain voluntary, be a tax on companies’ products sales or a fee on the global turnover of only those businesses highly reliant on the use of digital sequence information.
The money collected, which could range from $1 billion to $10 billion per year depending on estimates, should then be used for nature conservation and benefit local communities. Often seen as the steward of nature conservation, indigenous peoples in particular have been fighting to get direct access to the millions of dollars promised to help safeguard biodiversity.
Another key issues of the COP16 talks will be to agree on a monitoring framework and reporting obligations for governments, including common indicators, to track countries’ progress toward achieving the global goals.
The difficulty is that biodiversity is extremely complex and difficult to measure. But environmental NGOs and scientists say that there should be a limited but harmonized set of indicators that all countries report to. This is essential to be able to paint a global picture of the state of nature worldwide and effectively assess whether governments are meeting their international commitments.
Countries have also been asked to update their national biodiversity strategies ahead of COP16 and submit their national targets for a global stock-taking exercise. This should feed into an official report, to be prepared by Colombia as the COP16 presidency and the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) secretariat for the next round of talks in 2026, assessing how much the world has achieved of the Kunming-Montreal agreement.
So far, only 29 of the 196 country members of the CBD have submitted their updated biodiversity strategies, while 94 countries have contributed their national targets. This doesn’t yet allow to draw up a full picture of the current level of ambition in the implementation of the global agreement.
A final task of negotiators will be to pick a host for the next round of talks — COP17 — due to take place in 2026. And that’s likely to be contentious.
That’s because Armenia and Azerbaijan, which are in an open conflict over the contested territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, have both put their names forward but the decision has to be taken by consensus. It’s expected that they will neutralize each others’ application, and that countries supporting Ukraine against Russia’s unlawful invasion won’t be backing Azerbaijan because of its ties to the Russian regime.
A third country might therefore need to join the race to resolve the expected deadlock. But it’s currently unclear who that could be.
This article has been amended to correct the number of species scientists estimate are threatened with extinction.