Reacción a "COP16 agrees to adopt first global plan to finance nature conservation"

At last we have the first global plan to finance biodiversity conservation. It has been four months after the end of COP16 in Cali, Colombia, which ended bittersweetly with the suspension of the negotiations due to lack of quorum. That was the reason behind the three extra days of negotiations in Rome which, fortunately, have borne fruit.

This second round of negotiations had an even more geopolitically complicated game board than that of Cali. On the one hand, Susana Muhamad, Colombia's environment minister and president of COP16, announced her resignation as minister at the beginning of February, which could have a negative impact on the negotiations. And on the other hand, everything that is happening in the US, with anti-conservation policies and the withdrawal of funding for any environmental issue.

The issues on which consensus has been reached in this second round of COP16 are those that guarantee the implementation of the Global Biodiversity Framework. They include, on the one hand, resource mobilisation and a financial mechanism, and on the other hand, the monitoring framework.

As always in these kinds of negotiations, ambition has been on the low side, but with the way the world has been going lately, I am left with the incredibly positive part that we now, at last, have a clear roadmap for conserving and restoring biodiversity, and the financial resources to carry it out.