The COP16 biodiversity summit came to an abrupt halt after countries failed to reach consensus on the creation of a new fund during a mammoth 10-hour final plenary session.

Countries debated through the night on Friday in Cali, Colombia, in an attempt to get through the many items on COP16’s agenda.

But, as the talks dragged on into Saturday morning, a large number of developing-country delegates were forced to catch flights home, leaving parties without the “quorum” needed to reach consensus on key issues.

Countries did manage to find consensus on a new benefit-sharing mechanism for genetic resources – known as the “Cali fund” – after lengthy discussions and last-minute text changes put forward by India to protect sovereign rights.

Nations also agreed to a new permanent body for Indigenous peoples, which will allow them to advise and offer their view at biodiversity COPs directly for the first time.

However, the thorny issue of setting up a new fund under the COP – and the final agenda item on a new framework for monitoring countries’ progress on tackling biodiversity loss – will need to be revisited at intersessional meetings next year.

Talks were overshadowed by a lack of progress on implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the landmark “Paris Agreement for nature” deal made at COP15 in Montreal in 2022.

A joint investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian revealed just before the summit opened that the vast majority of countries missed a deadline to set out new plans for how they will meet the targets of the framework ahead of COP16.

By the summit’s end, just 44 out of 196 parties – 22% – had come up with new biodiversity plans.

Some megadiverse nations and major economies said they did not have the time needed to put plans in place, while developing countries said they were not provided with the funding required to produce new pledges.

Below, Carbon Brief has an in-depth summary and analysis of all of the key outcomes of COP16.

Formal negotiations

National biodiversity pledges (NBSAPs) and global review

NBSAPs

COP16 was the first biodiversity summit since nations signed a landmark agreement in late 2022 called the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which aims to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030. It is often described as the “Paris Agreement for nature”.

As part of the GBF and its underlying documents, countries agreed to submit new national biodiversity pledges, known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs) “by” COP16, which began on 21 October.

The new NBSAPs were meant to outline how countries will implement the goals and targets of the GBF within their borders.

As such, the publishing of new NBSAPs was viewed by many as a key test of whether countries are taking action to ensure biodiversity loss is reversed by 2030.

For the past year, Carbon Brief has been closely tracking the release of new NBSAPs. A handful of European nations, including Spain, Ireland and France, were the first to release new NBSAPs in 2023 and early 2024.

In the months leading up to COP16, progress was slow. In September, just one month before COP16, only 19 parties out of 196 had released new NBSAPs.

Just ahead of the summit in October, Carbon Brief co-published an investigation with the Guardian finding that 85% of nations – 170 out of 196 parties – were set to miss the deadline to release new NBSAPs by COP16.

This included 12 of the 17 “megadiverse countries”, which together provide a home to 70% of the world’s biodiversity. (The US is a megadiverse country, but is not party to the CBD.)

Carbon Brief and the Guardian spoke to several major economies and megadiverse nations about why they were unable to meet the deadline.

Megadiverse nations Brazil and Colombia said the timeframe given to produce new NBSAPs was not long enough to properly consult all the relevant stakeholders and Indigenous groups; India referenced difficulties translating the targets to a local context; and the UK blamed multiple changes in power, both in Scotland and at the national level.

Elsewhere, many developing nations said that a lack of timely funding available from the Global Environment Facility (GEF), a major multilateral environmental fund, had prevented them from being able to produce new NBSAPs.

Several parties published new NBSAPs during the summit itself – just after the deadline. This included COP16 host Colombia, as well as Germany, Iran, Venezuela, Peru, India, Thailand, Tanzania, Vietnam, Argentina and the Netherlands.

By the summit’s end on 2 November, 44 out of 196 parties had produced new NBSAPs.

According to the GBF and its underlying documents, countries that were “not in a position” to meet the deadline to submit NBSAPs ahead of COP16 were requested to instead submit national targets.

These submissions simply list biodiversity targets that countries will aim for without an accompanying plan for how they will be achieved.

By the end of the summit, some 119 parties had produced national targets.

This included many developing nations. Bernadette Fischler Hooper, global advocacy lead at WWF, told Carbon Brief that this demonstrated the willingness of developing countries to implement the targets of the GBF, despite not having the funds required to produce NBSAPs.

One of the major tasks for negotiators in Cali was to decide how to move forward after the majority of countries failed to produce new NBSAPs ahead of the talks.

At the end of the summit, a new decision text on NBSAPs was adopted.

The text “urges” countries that have not yet done so to release new NBSAPs “as soon as possible”. (In UN language terms, “urges” is stronger than “invites” or “encourages”, but not as strong as “requests” or “instructs”.)

Carbon Brief understands that, during the negotiations for the text, the UK put forward the idea of putting in a timeframe of “as soon as possible and no later than October 2025”.

(October 2025 is the date of the next Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) meeting.)

However, “the room did not seem taken” by the UK’s proposal, according to an insider, with many parties having the view that “as soon as possible” should be interpreted as meaning immediately.

Fischler Hooper told Carbon Brief that she had hoped to see the language say “as soon as possible, but no later than the end of 2025”, adding:

“Generally, having a clear deadline is good to keep countries to account. ‘As soon as possible’ is commonly understood as ‘really really soon’ and we can only hope that parties see it that way too.”

In acknowledgement of developing countries’ difficulties in producing new NBSAPs, the text also “requests” the GEF to “provide timely support to all eligible parties, aligned with national circumstances and needs, upon request, to enable them to” release new NBSAPs.

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Global review

The GBF and its underlying documents also set out a plan for how countries’ biodiversity plans should be reviewed and monitored.

According to these documents, parties must submit national reports containing agreed headline indicators in 2026 and 2029. (See: Monitoring framework.)

At COP16 and “subsequent COPs”, a global analysis of “NBSAPs, including national targets” should be conducted to assess progress towards achieving the GBF.

A “global review” should then be held, section J of the GBF says. This is an element that observers believe could be key for implementation. The underlying document says this global review should take place at COP17 in 2026 and COP19 in 2028.

After global reviews, there will be “voluntary peer reviews”, according to the GBF, after which countries “may take the outcome of the global reviews into account in future revisions and implementation of their” NBSAPs and national targets.

In Cali, negotiators were tasked with hammering out the finer details of how this reviewing process should work.

At the end of COP, they adopted a new text deciding on the details for the global review at COP17 and COP19.

The text “decides” that the global review “will culminate in a decision or decisions by the COPs, including any recommendations, as necessary, to identify and address challenges in collective progress in implementation, including on the means of implementation”.

It specifies that the global review “should be focused on assessing collective progress

and that the review will be undertaken in a facilitative, non-intrusive and non-punitive manner”. It adds that the review should be a “party-driven process”.

The text also says the global review should draw on national reports, advice from subsidiary bodies and a “global report” on the “collective progress” of countries in meeting biodiversity goals.

This global report will “draw upon data and information provided by parties and the best available peer-reviewed scientific, technical and technological information, as well as traditional knowledge given access to with the free, prior, informed consent of Indigenous people and local communities”.

The text does not clearly state how countries will need to respond to the global review, beyond “recalling” the decision under the GBF that countries “may” revise their NBSAPs in response.

One observer who followed the negotiations closely described the omission of any kind of follow up to the global review as a “main concern”, telling Carbon Brief:

“Parties must be much clearer about what they will do in response to the outcomes of the global review.”

The observer added that the final text “significantly reduced the number of inputs into the global review”, leaving little room for civil society to voice their concerns.

In addition, the global review text lacks any mention of “high-level political oversight”, which could have helped with engaging countries on implementation, the observer added.

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Finance

Finance was the headline “fight” of COP16, with deep divisions between developed and developing countries.

Just before 8:30am on Saturday morning, countries reached a stalemate on establishing a brand-new global biodiversity fund under the COP’s governance, which had been a key demand of developing countries.

As a requested check revealed that the COP no longer achieved quorum, discussions on the contours and governance of this fund will resume at a reconvening of COP16, likely to happen in tandem with next year’s intersessional talks.

While the failure to establish a new catch-all fund disappointed developing countries, the Colombian presidency attempted a last-minute push to have the fund established. The draft decision text issued at 3:30 am also included one of the presidency’s key priorities for the conference – the recognition of existing high debt burdens. This was despite pushback from debtor countries, such as China.

The final draft decision text on resource mobilisation “takes note of” efforts to accelerate international financial sector reform and calls for a review of how the global debt crisis is impacting biodiversity action.

​Reacting to the final text, Oscar Soria of the Common Initiative, said:

“Mobilising sufficient finance to achieve biodiversity goals has been a major issue for 30 years now. We saw insufficient leadership from wealthier countries: the EU and France in particular, Canada, Switzerland, Japan, the UK, but also China. The Colombian presidency was pushing for important topics to be included in conversations, such as sovereign debt, and put forward a rather exhaustive list of ways to explore biodiversity finance. [But] the state of distrust between developing and developed countries, and choices made by minister Muhamad in how she organised the process, made the negotiations very challenging in the last hours.”

Lim Li Ching of the Third World Network told Carbon Brief:

“The [global] north gets to keep the status quo. The [global south] gets a process.”

The Cali talks were a litmus test for whether and how countries had met their commitments to fund the GBF’s ambitious goals: to mobilise “at least $200bn per year” for biodiversity conservation by 2030 from “all sources”– domestic, international, public and private.

Of this, developed countries – along with others that “voluntarily assume” their obligations – are expected to “substantially and progressively increase” their international finance flows for nature “to at least $20bn per year by 2025, and to at least $30bn per year by 2030”, the GBF text states.

Two years ago, a finance package was rapidly gavelled through as part of the COP15 deal by the Chinese presidency, despite protest from developing countries. (See: Carbon Brief’s in-depth summary of COP15’s key outcomes.)

This ending was still fresh in countries’ minds from day one of the summit, when conversations around resource mobilisation and finance were herded, along with other fraught issues, into a working group.

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New fund and financial mechanism

In the run-up to COP15, developing countries, including South Africa, supported Brazil’s call for a new nature fund governed by the COP. In Montreal, countries accepted an interim fund – the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) – hosted under the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

By September this year, seven developed countries had contributed a total of less than $250m to the GBFF. The COP16 decision text on the financial mechanism, which was not passed, notes that “a number of eligible [p]arties have not yet accessed support from the GEF, in particular for the revision and updating of national biodiversity strategies”.

On the first day of COP16, Zimbabwe, speaking for Africa, and Brazil, speaking for megadiverse countries, revived the fight for a new fund that is separate from the GEF. In its intervention, Zimbabwe described the expectation that developed countries would deliver on the $20bn target as “seemingly wishful thinking”, but said that it could still be achieved “depending on what we decide at this COP16”.

Two days later, co-chairs published a 98-page-long non-paper that compiled what countries wanted for biodiversity finance over the next five years through to 2030. Non-papers are informal documents that bring together divergent views as parties attempt to reach a legal consensus. Non-papers do not usually attribute country positions explicitly, but this one included each country’s name alongside its wishlist for a new resource strategy.

In their submissions to the non-paper and elsewhere, developed countries, including Australia, Japan, the EU and others, opposed an entirely new fund. Many suggested leaving out references to Article 20 and 21 of the CBD, which cover equity. They also resisted including an update on their pledges to the GBFF.

“Finance day” at COP16, on 28 October, saw attempts and initiatives to thaw the resource deadlock. Seven countries, including New Zealand, France and Austria, as well as Quebec – the first sub-national government to do so – pledged $163m in total to the GBFF, taking the fund up to $396m.

Countries, observers and civil society reacted sharply to the announcement.

“We are talking about millions that have been pledged…But what we are expecting are billions,” Irène Wabiwa Betoko from Greenpeace told Reuters.

Brian O’Donnell, from Campaign for Nature, told Carbon Brief that “at least this $163m is grant money and not loans”.

As COP16 drew to a close, the future of the new fund seemed increasingly uncertain. After eight sessions of the contact group on resource mobilisation and the financial mechanism, (co-chaired by Ines Verleye of Belgium and Patrick Luna of Brazil), negotiations went straight to closed-door meetings with ministers and heads of delegation.

On Friday 1 November, the scheduled final day of COP16, the Colombian presidency released a draft decision text that proposed bumping discussions around a new funding instrument to intersessional discussions after COP16, with little other detail.

At 3:30 am on Saturday, well into overtime, COP16 president Susanna Muhamad alerted tired delegates to a new draft decision text on resource mobilisation. In an unexpected turn, the document contained a proposal to establish a new global biodiversity fund under the COP’s governance by COP30.

However, the passing of the text was prevented by the COP’s failure to reach quorum.

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$20bn tussle

A key tension at COP16 was a commitment in the GBF for developed countries to collectively mobilise “at least” $20bn a year by 2025 to progressively fill a $700bn biodiversity finance gap by 2030.

In Cali, with two months to go until 2025, it was unclear if developed countries would end up meeting this target, with almost all of them falling far short of their “fair share”. (See: Carbon Brief’s in-depth piece on biodiversity finance and fair shares.)

In the latest reporting data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development – which is only as recent as 2022 – developed countries, including the US, had contributed $12.1bn towards biodiversity finance in 2022. Furthermore, only $3.8bn of that finance was biodiversity-specific.

On Wednesday, 30 October, ministers from 20 developing countries issued a statement urging global-north governments to meet and exceed the $20bn target and to set up a working group of finance and environment ministers to get it done on time.

The Ministerial Alliance for Ambition on Nature Finance comprised Burkina Faso, Cambodia, Cameroon, Dominica, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Grenada, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Madagascar, Nigeria, St Kitts and Nevis, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Sudan, Togo, Vanuatu and Zambia.

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Private and innovative funding

Attempts to thaw the finance deadlock began right from the start of COP16, chiefly through private and “innovative” finance initiatives: from biodiversity credits to bonds and special hybrid funds.

Biodiversity credits were one of these mechanisms that saw both an increased push and increased civil society pushback at COP16. (See Carbon Brief’s in-depth Q&A on biodiversity offsets.)

Long-time CBD observers were surprised at their resurgence over the past two years. Neth Daño, Asia director of the ETC Group research collective, told Carbon Brief:

“In 2010, they killed the idea of biodiversity credits. Nobody thought they would come back like a zombie.”

On 28 October, the International Advisory Panel on Biodiversity Credits launched its framework for “high-integrity” principles for biodiversity markets, supported by France and the UK. The principles were dubbed “extremely problematic” by the Green Finance Observatory, a sustainable finance thinktank.

Meanwhile, the Brazil-led Tropical Forests Finance Facility (TFFF) received the backing of Colombia, as well as Malaysia, Indonesia, DRC and Ghana. The fund aims to raise $125bn for the six rainforest nations – dubbed the “Opec of rainforests” – through re-investing long-term loans from six developed countries: Norway, US, UK, France, Germany and Sweden.

While mobilising resources from “all sources” was the one point of consensus among parties in finance negotiations, the emphasis on private and “innovative” funding was criticised by developing countries.

In a press conference on 30 October, DRC’s environment minister, Ève Bazaiba, condemned developed countries for not meeting their commitments. She also championed the Lion’s Share Fund, which hopes to raise funds from companies and brands that use biodiversity in their logos and advertising.

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Digital sequence information

Of all negotiation tracks, digital sequence information (DSI) was one of the most keenly anticipated at COP16.

DSI is a term used at international talks to refer to genetic information from plants and animals.

This genetic information is often sourced from plants and animals in developing, biodiversity-rich countries by companies headquartered mainly in the global north, who use it to make products, such as drugs, cosmetics and food.

Because of this, developing nations have long called for the establishment of an international mechanism that can ensure that the benefits from DSI are shared fairly with the people living where the resources were discovered, including Indigenous groups.

While a fund and mechanism for sharing the benefits of DSI had already been established at COP15 in Montreal, many major loopholes remained in how both would work before it could formally begin.

This work was delegated to an “ad-hoc open-ended working group” on DSI, which met twice to resolve outstanding issues.

Earlier this month, negotiators met in Montreal for “five days of intense negotiations” to narrow down the options for the mechanism and fund, as well as how funds would “flow” through them.

This included deliberations on who would pay to use DSI, how much they would pay, what would “trigger” such payments, how this money would be disbursed – and to whom. It also covered how the entire mechanism would be managed and governed. 

Discussions on DSI were carried out under a dedicated contact group that met eight times to resolve the 311 square brackets (denoting unresolved issues) that still remained in the text at the outset of the summit.

At COP16, countries agreed to the first-ever global fund to which companies using genetic data “should contribute”, along with a unique multilateral mechanism to support it.

Pharmaceutical, cosmetics, agribusiness, nutraceutical and technology conglomerates that benefit from genetic data “should” contribute 1% of their profits, or 0.1% of their revenue, to the landmark “Cali fund” under the agreement.

However, DSI experts told Carbon Brief that the use of the word “should” implies that contributing to the fund is still voluntary and that the payment rates are “indicative”, non-binding ones. In the run-up to COP16, blocs including African and Latin American countries sought a legally binding mechanism on DSI.

Additionally, companies could potentially avoid paying, since they are no longer required to prove that they did not use genetic data. A key clause was removed from the penultimate draft of the document that asked companies to “demonstrate” that they were not using DSI.

Instead, the final text leaves the decision up to companies.

Agribusiness – or “animal and plant breeding”, as it reads in the text – nearly escaped scrutiny, as a reference to agribusiness was removed from the “indicative list of sectors” that may benefit from the use of DSI. While it was included in the president’s draft issued on Friday morning, it had disappeared from the draft text issued later that night.

This raised concern among observers that other industries could be similarly lobbying for their exclusion from the list. (Carbon Brief understands that Switzerland raised the potential for removing pharmaceuticals from the list on the margins of the negotiations.)

Animal and plant breeding was added back into the text that was, ultimately, adopted at the plenary.

Despite countries such as Zimbabwe – opposed by Japan and Canada – insisting that academia and research institutions should contribute to the fund, this is no longer the case. Instead, these institutions are only expected to make explicit on their databases the countries of origin of data, to provide cues to users of these databases on to whom benefits should go to. Preserving open access was a key priority for the EU, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, Norway and Australia.

Nithin Ramakrishnan, a DSI expert at Third World Network, told Carbon Brief:

“The decision is giving biopirates a chance to make a one-time donation to the Cali Fund and get away with it.”

The final text states that at least half of all benefits going to the fund must be used to meet the “self-identified” needs of Indigenous communities in developing countries, particularly women and youth, although it concedes that this could be limited by “national circumstances”.

Countries, too, will receive “direct allocations” of funding, a subject that was keenly contested.

The global mechanism was set to supersede national laws around DSI, access and benefit-sharing, such as those developed by Brazil. However, many countries, including Bangladesh, Bolivia, India, Egypt and Argentina, saw this clause as a “blow to sovereignty” and a “washout for national access-and-benefit sharing laws”.

At 3:30am – when the Colombian presidency published a new draft DSI decision text – India strongly objected, asking for a clause on ensuring national access-and-benefit-sharing laws to be included in the annex.

Panama raised objections about the limited time to review the draft. At the plenary, it said:

“We’ve spent months on the previous version and we’ve also made sure that we invested resources before we came to the COP to discuss this. Like other small delegations. Panama has many real limitations in terms of its capacity to review and decide on a mechanism of this scope before the end of this COP. We consider that this action does not reflect adequate consideration concerning smaller delegations. And, therefore, we want to state that on many occasions, we were available to support the president in this matter, and we were excluded.”

Ramakrishnan told Carbon Brief:

“Developing countries didn’t yield sovereignty after two years of pressure from developed countries and industry and scientist lobbies [who said] this is a voluntary fund, so [national laws] don’t apply.”

The final decision explicitly does not supersede national legislation.

One of the key features of the DSI decision is revenue or profit-sharing by large companies benefiting from DSI, which emerged in a non-paper on Wednesday morning.

This was developed from a proposal by the Ocean Biodiversity Collective, which works on providing interdisciplinary expertise to countries on DSI negotiations. Lead researcher from the collective, Dr Siva Thambisetty, told Carbon Brief:

“Providing expertise in fraught negotiations is an opportunity and a challenge. [Our] model, which became the Norway proposal, had several elements to build a new payments system. One of the key values that must be embedded in the mechanism are that contributors ‘pay nature first’. Second, ‘everyone pays’ honours the principle that biodiversity is not a free asset and ensures a broad base for payments.

“Some of those elements were lost during the push and pull of the discussions. No party ever gets everything they want, of course, but it’s important that the core basis is not mangled going forward. We will need to assess implications fully in the coming days.”

The global DSI fund established by the decision will now be “under the authority of and accountable to” the COP.

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Monitoring framework

The monitoring framework – one part of the negotiations covering mechanisms for planning, monitoring, reporting and review – is seen as critical to the success of the GBF.

This is, in part, because the failure of the previous set of biodiversity goals, the Aichi targets, has been widely blamed on the lack of implementation.
The monitoring framework is made up of a set of indicators corresponding to each goal and target of the GBF. There are four types of indicators:

• Headline indicators.
• Binary indicators.
• Component indicators.
• Complementary indicators.

Headline indicators are used to measure progress against quantitative targets, such as the pledge to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030.

For more qualitative targets, such as the target to mainstream gender considerations across biodiversity planning, a set of binary indicators were developed – yes/no questions that countries answer about the presence or absence of legislation, policies or regulations relating to the target.

Component indicators measure progress towards sub-targets in the GBF, while complementary indicators assess areas that are related, but not necessarily explicitly laid out in the framework.

Countries are mandated to report on headline and binary indicators, but the component and complementary indicators are optional. As a result, throughout the negotiations, countries went back and forth on which indicators should fall into which category.

Lim Li Lin, a senior legal and environment advisor at Third World Network, told Carbon Brief:

“Everyone’s doing a juggle, right? We want the good ones to go in the mandatory, and we want the bad ones to go in the complementary, if we can’t get rid of them. And everyone’s doing the same thing from their own interest and perspective.”

At COP15 in Montreal, countries agreed on a monitoring framework, but that text also included a decision to review the monitoring framework at the subsequent COP and “thereafter keep the monitoring framework under review, as appropriate”.

The Montreal agreement also included the establishment of an ad-hoc technical expert group, which comprised 45 members – 30 representatives from parties and 15 observers, including representatives from the Global Youth Biodiversity Network and the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity.

The ad-hoc group met six times over the course of the two-year interstitial period. An online forum also allowed other individuals and groups to comment on and discuss proposed indicators. The results of those meetings and discussions fed into the discussions in Cali.

However, the recommendations of the ad-hoc group were not uniformly accepted by parties.

Kirsty Leong, senior specialist on global policy and advocacy at WWF, told Carbon Brief:

“Procedurally, some parties are saying, ‘Hey, we gave a mandate to this expert group. So now we should adopt that framework’…And other parties are saying, ‘Well, actually, we never negotiated, and so everything’s still discussable.’”

A few indicators proved particularly contentious during the negotiations, including those on monitoring pesticide use and those related to digital sequence information and benefit-sharing from genetic resources.

On pesticide use, parties were split over whether countries should report “pesticide environment concentration” or “aggregated total applied toxicity”.

The former indicator is what was agreed in the decision in Montreal, but the latter is what was suggested by the ad-hoc technical expert group, which said that there is no reliable data on pesticide environment concentration.

Successive non-papers on the monitoring framework contained longer and longer footnotes about the pesticide indicator as parties struggled to reach consensus.

Version	Date	Footnote text
Non-paper v1	24 October	n/a