CALI, Colombia — Negotiations at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, or COP16, in Cali, Colombia, were suspended as talks went into overtime on Saturday and too few countries were present to reach an agreement around a new fund for nature.
This conference was anticipated to be the “implementation COP,” where delegates were meant to iron out the details of the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, or GBFF, which was established as an interim fund at COP15 Montreal in 2022. Experts also expected a new monitoring framework and for countries to submit their own plans to preserve and conserve biodiversity. The goals included protecting 30% of land and sea by 2030 — dubbed the “30 by 30” goal — and for wealthier countries to provide $20 billion a year by 2025 for nature conservation and $30 billion per year by 2030.
But as the clock ran out in Cali, the finance discussions never happened.
About the authors
Tais Gadea Lara
Tais Gadea Lara is a climate journalist from Argentina. She has been covering the climate negotiations and international politics since 2014. She is currently a climate explorer at the Constructive Institute. She is the author of the newsletter Planeta and collaborates in different media, such as the National Geographic, Climática La Marea, and Climate Tracker. In 2020, she created the Environmental Journalism Workshop to train more people in the communication of the climate and ecological crisis. For several years, she has been recognized as one of the 100 Latinos most committed to climate action.
Jesse Chase-Lubitz
Jesse Chase-Lubitz covers climate change and multilateral development banks for Devex. She previously worked at Nature Magazine, where she received a Pulitzer grant for an investigation into land reclamation. She has written for outlets such as Al Jazeera, Bloomberg, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, and The Japan Times, among others. Jesse holds a master’s degree in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics.
