By AFP - Agence France Presse
COP16: Biodiversity financing agreement for 'early 2025': Presidency
The Colombian president of COP16, the UN conference on biodiversity, expressed confidence on Saturday that a key financial agreement for the protection of species could be reached “in the first quarter of 2025”.
Delegates failed to agree on a financial roadmap at the Cali summit earlier this month.
But the president of COP16, Colombia's Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, told AFP on the sidelines of the COP29 climate talks in Baku that she was confident of an agreement early next year.
The 196 member countries of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity left Cali two weeks ago without being able to agree on a financial plan to strengthen efforts to halt the destruction of nature by 2030, even though the discussion stretched on for hours.
Instead, the participants adopted a plan for a multilateral fund designed to be supplemented by private companies that profit from the digital sequencing of genome source information.
Muhamad noted that this in itself constituted a “base-building mechanism” to promote investment in biodiversity conservation. There had been more progress in defining a broader roadmap for financing biodiversity, he added.
“We hope that at the next plenary, we can close COP16 in the first quarter of next year and that we can reach this agreement in the first quarter of 2025,” she told AFP.
The formal signing of the dossier will probably take place at the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, she added.
The Cali summit attracted an unprecedented 23,000 participants for the largest biodiversity summit ever held, seeking to go beyond the timid implementation of the Kunming-Montreal agreement two years ago to save the planet from deforestation, overexploitation, climate change, and pollution.
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