It could have been a key moment in reversing the global crisis of environmental degradation. But the latest international summit on the 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, COP16, held in Cali, Colombia, ended with no agreement on the crucial issue of financing.

Biodiversity COPs are held every two years, and this was the first summit since the Global Biodiversity Framework was hammered out in painstaking negotiations and agreed in December 2022. The framework makes a landmark commitment to conserve 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030, reflecting intensive civil society advocacy. It also pledges to restore 30 per cent of degraded ecosystems by 2030. And to pay for all this, it promises to mobilise US$20 billion a year by 2025 and at least US$30 billion annually by 2030, from rich to poorer countries, as part of an overall target of US$200 billion a year.

A new agreement was urgently needed. Research increasingly suggests a mass extinction is underway, with wildlife populations declining by an average of 69 per cent since 1970 and 38 per cent of tree species at risk of extinction. The most threatened areas are in countries in the global south. And little has been done so far to reverse the loss: since 2020, the area of land and sea under protection has increased by just 0.5 per cent.

At risk are vital but fragile ecological chains on land and sea that human life depends on. Yet history shows environmental degradation isn’t inevitable: several species have been brought back from the brink by concerted intervention. Humans are the ones causing the destruction, so have a responsibility to stop it – but it will take effort and resources.

Funding deadlock

Reaching a global agreement was hard – but getting the money to implement it is even harder. With the clock steadily ticking towards the 2030 deadline, the job of COP16 was to deliver on the financial promise. But it failed because rich countries put their own interests first.

The talks overran before being suspended on 2 November with no agreement on a proposal to set up a fund to help meet the US$30 billion commitment. Global north countries – including Australia, Canada, Japan and the European Union bloc – refused to budge. On the other side stood many governments from Africa, Latin America and Oceania, insisting a new fund is essential to meet the framework’s commitments. They want a new fund because they believe the current Global Environment Facility is too influenced by global north states and too hard to access.

As prospects of a deal faded, many representatives of global south states were forced to head home, lacking the budgets to change their travel plans to stay for overrunning talks, until the meeting didn’t have the minimum numbers required to continue. By the end, the single remaining member of the Fiji delegation pointed out she was the only Pacific Island representative left in the room. This means the vital question of funding has been kicked down the road until a next year in Bangkok, Thailand.

As it stands, seven global north states pledged a combined total of US$163 million to an existing fund: a start, but far short of the target. A group of global south states have pointed out there’s been no significant increase in funds available to them since the framework was agreed. It isn’t just that the money isn’t forthcoming – it’s hard to see any reason to believe further negotiations will solve the problem.

Brighter spots

The meeting also ended with no agreement on how to monitor the four goals and 23 targets for progress by 2030 set at COP15. This is indicative of an overall lack of prioritisation: only 44 of 195 states – under a quarter – came to COP16 with updated plans to meet the new targets.

But it wasn’t all bad news. After lengthy negotiations, states agreed on a plan to improve links between biodiversity negotiations and those on climate change. Global biodiversity processes have long played second fiddle to climate change talks – which are also falling far short – even though the two crises are intimately connected: climate change is a major cause and accelerator of biodiversity loss, while the natural environment, if looked after, offers a vital source of resilience and response to climate change, including by absorbing carbon dioxide.

Another important agreement centred on digital sequencing information – the biological genetic data that includes DNA and RNA information , which many businesses – including cosmetics, pharmaceuticals and food companies – exploit for commercial gain. This creates a huge inequality, since global south countries typically contribute vast amounts of genetic data from their unique animals and plants but don’t benefit from its use.

An earlier agreement, the 2010 Nagoya Protocol, was supposed to ensure fair and equitable sharing of benefits from the use of genetic resources, but that hasn’t happened, and the technology and its commercial exploitation has mushroomed since. This was a crucial issue when the new framework was negotiated, and the agreement reached was to establish a fund that users of genetic data would pay in to.

The details were left to COP16, which agreed on a new fund, the Cali Fund, that companies will be asked to pay into when they use genetic data, with the money going to the countries where the information comes from. They’ll be expected to pay one per cent of profits or 0.1 per cent of revenue. But payment will be voluntary.

This means it will fall on all involved – civil society, states, international bodies and the more socially responsible companies – to promote the fund, urge payments, recognise good practice and expose bad practice and build up a global norm that users should expect to pay for access to biological genetic data. Crucially, states will have to pass legislation to incorporate the agreement into domestic law. This will now be a key focus of civil society advocacy, while many companies, particularly transnational corporations, can be expected to do all they can to evade their responsibilities.

If the fund works, Indigenous communities should be a major beneficiary. And the meeting broke new ground in recognising and empowering Indigenous leadership. Around the world, Indigenous communities are on the frontline of efforts to protect nature. They’re the source of much knowledge about how to live in harmony with the land and sea. But they’re also the target of repression, as states and companies often see Indigenous people as a barrier to extraction and exploitation of natural resources. The result is lethal violence: of over 2,000 environmental and land rights defenders killed since 2012, around a third were Indigenous people.

For this to change, Indigenous people must be able to participate actively in processes to protect natural resources, so it’s an important step that COP16 agreed to create a permanent body to represent Indigenous peoples and local communities – defined as those with a long-standing association with the place they live – in negotiations. The text also recognises the role of Latin America’s Afro-descendant people, who have also long been discriminated against and excluded.

Indigenous people have long worked together in an informal group, but to get access to negotiations they had to rely on the goodwill of their governments to include them in official delegations. But when governments see Indigenous people as enemies they lock them out. Now they won’t have to rely on these fragile relationships. The new body has wider value, offering a model of inclusion and participation that could be adopted in more UN processes.

Such participation structures could help counter the influence of industry lobbyists, who were present in record numbers at COP16. Some 1,261 business representatives registered, more than double the number at COP15. As with the annual series of climate summits, increasingly attended by fossil fuel lobbyists who work to limit action on greenhouse gas emissions, many were in Cali to defend the interests of businesses that profit from environmental exploitation. Fossil fuel representatives were among those present, along with lobbyists from the biotech, food and pharmaceutical industries. Some corporate teams outnumbered delegations from many global south countries, and several were part of official government delegations.

Unlocking progress

The financing challenge is hard to crack. The COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan, which was similarly supposed to unlock progress on funding, also failed to bridge the financial gap. Global north states, increasingly controlled or influenced by right-wing populists and nationalists, are growing less inclined to put short-term national interests aside to tackle global problems. They may well point to economic constraints, with higher energy and food prices squeezing budgets and fuelling public discontent.

But at the same time, there are more super-rich people than ever before. Over the past decade, the world’s richest one per cent have added another US$42 trillion to their wealth. Fossil fuel firms have banked unanticipated record profits as a result of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The money is there; it’s just in the wrong places. Unless solutions such as taxes on extreme wealth and windfall profits – unexpectedly high returns resulting from market conditions – are taken seriously, the money will keep enabling the destructive patterns of extraction and consumption that are causing the biodiversity crisis, rather than being used to solve it.

Momentum is building: the national leaders of the G20, the club of the world’s biggest economies, have just agreed on the need to ‘ensure that ultra-high-net-worth individuals are effectively taxed’. This should be a major focus for civil society advocacy. The G20’s acknowledgement of the need for change must now be followed up with a redistribution of wealth so that funding matches the scale of the interlinked crises of climate change and biodiversity loss.

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