The world in 2022 reached its most ambitious deal ever to halt the destruction of nature by decade’s end.
Two years later, countries are already behind on meeting their goals.
As nearly 200 nations meet on Monday (Oct 21) for a two-week UN biodiversity summit, COP16, in Cali, Colombia, they will be under pressure to prove their support for the goals laid out in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework agreement.
A top concern for countries and companies is how to pay for conservation, with the COP16 talks aiming to develop new initiatives that could generate revenues for nature.
“We have a problem here,” said Gavin Edwards, director of the nonprofit Nature Positive.
“COP16 is an opportunity to re-energise and remind everybody of their commitments two years ago and start to course correct if we’re going to get anywhere close to 2030 targets being achieved,” Edwards said.
The rate of nature destruction through activities like logging or overfishing has not let up, while governments miss deadlines on their biodiversity action plans and funding for conservation is billions of dollars away from meeting a 2025 goal.
The summit in Colombia, marking the 16th meeting of nations that signed the original 1992 Convention on Biodiversity, is set to be the largest biodiversity summit to date, with some 23,000 delegates registered to participate as well as a large exhibition area open to the public.
Whether the participation and pressure can push countries for bolder conservation actions remains to be seen.
The clearest sign of lagging efforts is the fact that most countries have yet to submit national conservation plans, known officially as National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), though they had agreed to do so by the start of COP16.
As of Friday, 31 out of 195 countries had filed a plan to the UN biodiversity secretariat.
Richer nations have been quicker to file with many European nations, Australia, Japan, China, South Korea and Canada having filed their plans.
The United States attends the talks but never ratified the Convention on Biodiversity, so is not obligated to submit a plan.
Another 73 countries as of Friday had opted to only file a less ambitious submission that sets out their national targets, without details of how they would be achieved.
With so few plans filed, experts will likely struggle to gauge progress in meeting the agreement’s hallmark “30 by 30” goal of preserving 30 per cent of the land and sea by 2030.
