Nearly three months after negotiations of the United Nations biodiversity summit, known as COP16, collapsed as the group representing vulnerable island states walked out with key financial decisions to help secure $200 billion annually by 2030 thwarted by the developed world, nations will be gathering again in Rome next week to address the agenda items that remained pending.
The last meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity held in Cali in Colombia was suspended due to a lack of quorum.
The most crucial issue at the resumed session, slated from February 25-27 in the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), is to work towards the adoption of a Strategy for Resource Mobilisation to help secure $200 billion annually by 2030 from all sources to support biodiversity initiatives worldwide, including the mobilisation of at least $20 billion a year in Official Development Assistance (ODA) by 2025 and $30 billion a year by 2030, in line with Target 19 of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF).
Target 18 of the KMGBF also addresses the reduction of harmful incentives by at least $500 billion per year by 2030. Parties will also further discuss work towards a dedicated global financing instrument for biodiversity, including a roadmap to this effect until 2030.
Nearly 200 countries are expected to complete a crucial step by finalising the monitoring framework agreed upon at COP15. The monitoring framework is essential to the implementation of the KMGBF because it provides the common yardsticks that parties will use to measure progress against the 23 targets, a spokesperson for the UN biodiversity summit told IANS.
On mechanism for planning, monitoring, reporting and review (PMRR), nations are expected to make important decisions on how progress in the implementation of the KMGBF will be reviewed at COP17 as part of the planned global stocktake. They are expected to determine how commitments from actors other than national governments can be included in the PMRR mechanism, including commitments from youth, women, indigenous peoples and local communities, civil society, the private sector and sub-national governments.
In addition, the national reporting template, which includes the headline indicators of the monitoring framework, must also be finalized said the spokesperson.
On the financial mechanism, the nations are expected to endorse the achievements of the Global Environment Facility (GEF), encourage further contributions to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), and provide additional guidance to the GEF considering its upcoming replenishment negotiations. Other agenda items are decisions on cooperation with other conventions and international organisations, CBD’s multi-year programme of work, and the adoption of final reports from COP 16, COPMOP 11 (Cartagena Protocol), and COPMOP 5 (Nagoya Protocol).
The Cali Fund on sharing of benefits from the use of digital sequence information from genetic resources will be launched on February 25 in the margins of the resumed Conference of the Parties (COP).
The signing of the pact between UNEP and the CBD Secretariat, UNDP and the Multi-Partner Trust Fund Office will mark the official opening of the Cali Fund. The Cali Fund is innovative and revolutionary in that it is a private sector-led fund established by the COP to the CBD for monetary benefits from the use of DSI to flow back to nature and the self-determined rights of indigenous peoples and local communities towards achieving the third objective of the convention.
Among the positives is that in two years of the KMGBF, 119 countries have aligned their national targets to protect biodiversity. This means most countries have now translated the global targets into targets of their own adapting global goals to national priorities.
At the COP16, India launched an updated National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) by adopting a “whole-of-government” and “whole-of-society” approach, outlining strategies to address environmental challenges through ecosystem restoration, species recovery programmes, and community-driven conservation efforts.
Union Minister of State for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Kirti Vardhan Singh, had said the updated NBSAP, aligned with the KMGBF, is a vital roadmap to address the strategies to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030, with a longer-term vision of living in harmony with nature by 2050.
