Nations agree plan to finance nature protection, at second attempt
The U.N.'s COP16 talks on biodiversity began last October in Colombia but failed at that time to reach an agreement on key elements, including who would contribute, how the money would be gathered and who would oversee it.
U.S. President Donald Trump is scaling back the involvement of the world's biggest economy in development finance, so the agreement late on Thursday night was a welcome boost for global deal-making.
Led by negotiators from the so-called BRICS countries - Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa - the final deal saw delegates agree a plan to find at least $200 billion per year from a range of sources to protect nature.
COP16 President and Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad heralded the agreement as a triumph for nature and for multilateralism in a year when the political landscape is increasingly fragmented and diplomatic frictions are growing.
"From Cali to Rome we have sent a light of hope that still the common good, the environment and the protection of life and the capacity to come together for something bigger than the national interest is possible," she said.
Delegates also agreed to explore whether a new biodiversity fund needed to be created, as requested by some developing countries, or whether an existing fund like the one run by the Global Environment Facility would be enough. The GEF has provided more than $23 billion to thousands of nature projects in the past 30 years.
"Everyone with the spirit of compromise made concessions, and in general for developing countries the result was very positive," Maria Angelica Ikeda, director of the Department of Environment at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Reuters as the plenary wrapped up on Thursday night.
"I come out of the meeting happy and optimistic."
The need for action has only increased in recent years, with the average size of wildlife populations down 73% since 1970, data from the WWF's 2024 Living Planet Report shows.
Although the U.S. was never a signatory to the biodiversity convention, it was one of the biggest funders of nature and biodiversity efforts. Its current freeze on foreign aid has had broad impacts, from anti-poaching efforts suspended in South Africa to funding cuts at big conservation NGOs.
The cuts are also raising concerns the U.S. will not participate in the next round of replenishments for the GEF, which are underway.
The spectre of aid cuts was also felt in negotiating rooms, fuelling frustration among some countries from Brazil to Egypt and Panama that rich nations were not fulfilling their obligations to deliver grant money.
Latest OECD data estimates a total of $15.4 billion of international biodiversity finance was disbursed in 2022, with 83% of this coming from public sources.
Zoological Society of London's policy head Georgina Chandler urged governments to fulfil their commitment to $30 billion per year by 2030 to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.
The deal in Rome helps lay out the steps needed to implement the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) deal, agreed in 2022 and which committed countries to a range of environmental targets.
Countries also agreed a set of technical rules for monitoring progress towards the GBF and secured a commitment for countries to publish a national report on their biodiversity plans for the COP17 nature talks.
The talks come at the start of a busy year for international climate diplomacy as countries meet at various events to discuss plastics pollution, preserving the oceans and meeting global development goals, ahead of the COP30 climate talks in November.
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The Independent
13 minutes ago
- The Independent
Trump isn't fighting for peace in Ukraine, he's managing Russia's victory - and Europe is worried
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Reuters
14 minutes ago
- Reuters
Russian oil flows to Hungary and Slovakia halted after Ukrainian attack
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The Guardian
14 minutes ago
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'Trump's top officials, many of whom lack the experience, judgment, intellect and temperament to do their jobs properly, know Trump's playbook and are determined to remain where they are … Everyone around Trump sees he has paid very little cost for his perfidy. They're following the boss.' Leaders at key agencies have followed Trump's playbook of attacking facts and widely accepted science with regulatory moves to undermine climate change science and alternative fuels. The EPA, as well as the interior and energy departments, has stepped up efforts to throttle spending and regulations to expand wind and solar energy; Trump has attacked green energy as part of his conspiratorial view that climate change is a 'hoax', while aggressively promoting his fossil fuel agenda of 'drill, baby, drill'. 'The Trump team has launched an all-of-government assault on wind and solar,' said Michael Gerrard, who runs the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. Gerrard said: 'When Obama's EPA issued the endangerment finding in 2009 there was a ton of scientific evidence supporting it. There are now 10 tons. There are a few ounces on the other side, but Trump's EPA is seizing on the ounces as an excuse to wipe out our strongest legal tool to fight climate change. 'The EPA, the energy and interior departments, and even the Federal Aviation Administration, are using all available tools, and making up some new ones, to suppress these sources of clean power.' Other experts and scientists are alarmed too that Kennedy has stepped up efforts to block vaccines he has long castigated without real evidence as dangerous. Earlier this month, Kennedy announced in a statement the ending of 22 projects worth $500m to develop mRNA technologies that have been used in vaccines to combat respiratory viruses such as Covid and the flu. In response to Kennedy's move, Trump told reporters that 'we're on to other things' and said the administration was focused now on 'looking for other answers to other problems, to other sicknesses and diseases'. Trump, a former champion of the Covid vaccines, seems to have ignored several recent moves by Kennedy which health experts have sharply criticized. In July, Kennedy abruptly fired a 17-member CDC panel that recommends vaccines, and replaced it with a smaller committee that boasts some known vaccine sceptics. Further, Kennedy has balked at offering strong support for vaccinations even as the CDC reported 1,356 measles cases as of this month, the highest total of annual cases since 2000, when the United States declared measles eliminated. On a legal battlefront, former prosecutors say truth and facts are under assault at the justice department, which increasingly has acted without solid evidence of misconduct to investigate Trump's declared foes, such as the former FBI director James Comey and ex-CIA director John Brennan. Trump in July baselessly accused Obama of 'treason' for his administration's inquiry into Russian influence efforts to help Trump win in 2016. The move came despite multiple reports, including one from the bipartisan Senate intelligence panel, concluding that Moscow mounted a drive to boost Trump. Trump's comments followed Gabbard's release of classified materials that did not support his allegations, say critics. Yet the attorney general, Pam Bondi, then impaneled a grand jury to investigate the charges as Gabbard requested. Some legal scholars see a pattern with earlier Trump tactics to fudge facts and revise history and warn of the justice department's marked politicization under Trump and Bondi. The Columbia law professor and ex-federal prosecutor Daniel Richman said: 'The announcement of a grand jury investigation into Obama and Biden officials [is] just the latest effort to support a false narrative with the presence of official action.' From a historical perspective, critics say the Trump administration's assaults on truth and facts will do long-term damage. 'The United States did not put a man on the moon or invent the transistor, the internet, the polio vaccine, or [on the negative side] the atomic bomb by ignoring or making up facts,' said Gerrard. 'All these achievements resulted from scientists doing the very hard work of discovering truths about the physical world and using them in brilliant ways. 'A country that instead ignores facts it doesn't like and invents falsities can achieve very little beyond satisfying those who share the leaders' ideology. We are on a dangerous path to mediocrity, or worse.'
