Signs that progress was lacking were clear from the outset of the meeting, with nearly all countries missing a deadline to submit official plans on how they will achieve the ambitious biodiversity targets set two years ago at COP15, including protecting 30 per cent of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030. A few more of these plans trickled in during the two weeks of the summit, including those from large countries like India and Argentina, but most countries’ strategies are still missing.
Going into COP16, it was clear the world is not on track to hit those targets. Since 2020, the area of the planet’s land and oceans under formal protections has increased just 0.5 per cent, according to a UN report released during the summit. That is a rate far too slow to protect 30 per cent of the planet by the end of the decade.
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Many lower-income countries said their failure to develop and submit plans by the deadline, let alone to begin carrying them out, was due to a dearth of financial resources. COP16 did see higher-income countries make pledges – totalling about $400 million – to help these efforts, but funds remain billions short of the $20 billion annual goal promised by 2025.
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Although COP16’s failure to move the needle on finance disappointed observers, the meeting did manage one key agreement: a deal on how to collect revenue from products developed using the planet’s genetic data. Before the meeting was suspended, countries agreed to urge pharmaceutical and other biotech companies that use such “digital sequence information” to contribute 0.1 per cent of revenue or 1 per cent of profits to a “Cali Fund”. This fund will be used to protect the biodiversity that is the source of such genetic data.
Submitter's note: It seems this voluntary tax is expected to support primarily indigenous populations. But without funding for biodiversity protection plans, habitat destruction will continue largely unabated. The voluntary tax itself would be woefully insufficient for empowering local populations to protect their ecosystems or their traditional lifestyles.
[...] UN estimates suggest the fund could raise up to a billion dollars a year for biodiversity. “It might raise some, but at nowhere near the scale or speed required,” says Pierre du Plessis, a long-time negotiator for the African Union.
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[T]he overall mood was dour. “A real shame of COP16 is that [debates on] digital sequence information sucked up the last drops of energy and time,” says Amber Scholz at the Leibniz Institute DSMZ in Germany.
One reason for the apparent lack of urgency is that the world treats climate change and biodiversity loss as two separate issues. The annual global climate summits are better attended and receive far more attention than the biodiversity negotiation – only six heads of state attended COP16, compared with the 154 who went to last year’s climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. That is a problem when the two issues are intertwined: climate change is one of the main threats to biodiversity, and the most biodiverse ecosystems are often also the best at storing carbon.