More than 85% of countries are set to miss the UN’s deadline to submit new nature pledges ahead of the COP16 biodiversity summit in Colombia, according to a joint investigation by Carbon Brief and the Guardian.
Three of the G7 nations are among those not to publish new national pledges, known as national biodiversity strategies and action plans (NBSAPs), ahead of the talks, which will take place in the city of Cali from from 21 October to 1 November..
Only five of the 17 “megadiverse countries” – which together provide a home to 70% of the world’s biodiversity – have produced new pledges for tackling nature loss, according to the Carbon Brief and Guardian analysis.
The three nations that hold the vast majority of the Amazon rainforest – Brazil, Peru and COP16 host nation Colombia – have all failed to produce new nature plans before the talks.
All of the six countries responsible for the Congo basin in Africa, the world’s second-largest rainforest after the Amazon, also missed the deadline.
Representatives from environment ministries across the world tell Carbon Brief and the Guardian that “technical difficulties” and “structural barriers” – ranging from the need for lengthy consultations with stakeholders to delays caused by general elections – prevented them from meeting the deadline.
Biodiversity on Earth is declining at a faster rate than at any time in human history. Around one million animal and plant species face extinction, with human activity having already altered 70% of the land surface and 87% of the ocean.
Missed deadlines and delays
At COP15 in 2022, nations signed a landmark agreement 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 agreement, countries agreed to submit new NBSAPs “by” COP16 in October 2024.
NBSAPs are blueprints for how individual countries plan to tackle biodiversity loss, as well as ensure they meet the targets outlined in the GBF.
They are similar to nationally determined contributions (NDCs), plans that outline how individual countries envisage meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement. However, a key difference is that countries are legally obliged to submit NDCs, but not NBSAPs.
The publishing of new NBSAPs was meant to ensure that countries actually implement the targets of the GBF within their borders. A lack of implementation was widely cited as one of the major factors behind the failure of the last set of global biodiversity rules, the Aichi targets, which were agreed in 2010.
However, the Carbon Brief and Guardian analysis shows that just 25 countries and the EU have met the deadline to publish an NBSAP ahead of COP16. This leaves 170 countries that have not met the deadline.
(Carbon Brief’s in-depth NBSAP tracker contains a full list of the 26 parties that have published an NBSAP and examines what their plans say about stemming biodiversity loss.)
Rainforests at risk
Only five of the 17 “megadiverse countries” – which together provide a home to 70% of the world’s biodiversity – have produced new NBSAPs. This includes Australia, China, Indonesia, Malaysia and Mexico.
The megadiverse countries to miss the deadline are Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, India, Madagascar, Papua New Guinea, Peru, the Philippines, South Africa and Venezuela. (The US is a megadiverse country, but is not a signatory to the biodiversity convention.)
A representative for COP16 host nation Colombia tells Carbon Brief and the Guardian that the country has been working “for over a year” on its NBSAP, starting before the country knew it would host the next round of biodiversity talks. (Colombia offered to host COP16 last year after the original host Turkey was forced to withdraw following major earthquakes in the country.)
In 2024, the environment ministry “organised more than 30 events in every region of the country, reaching more than 20 cities” to consult a range of Indigenous and local community groups on the ministry’s proposal for tackling nature loss in the country, the spokesperson says.
This lengthy consultation process has caused the country to miss the deadline, the spokesperson adds. However, they say that Colombia plans to publish its NBSAP at the start of the COP16 summit.
A representative for Brazil – the most biodiverse nation on Earth, home to nearly 60% of the Amazon rainforest – also tells Carbon Brief and the Guardian that the publishing of its NBSAP has been delayed by a “broad consultation process”.
Braulio Dias, director of biodiversity conservation at the Brazilian ministry of environment, who is responsible for the NBSAP process, says:
“Brazil is a huge country with the largest share of biodiversity [and] a large population with a complex governance. We are a federation with 26 states and 5,570 municipalities. We started the process to update our NBSAP in May last year and have managed to conclude a broad consultation process involving over a thousand people in face-to-face meetings.
“We are in the process of consolidating all proposals received, consulting all the departments of the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, all the federal ministries and agencies engaged in the biodiversity agenda and the National Biodiversity Committee, before we can have a high-level political endorsement. Then we still have to build a monitoring strategy, a finance strategy and a communication strategy. We will only conclude this process toward the end of the year or early next year.”
The representative of another megadiverse nation, India, declined repeated requests for comment on why it has not published its NBSAP.
Back in August, Dr V Rajagopalan, chair of India’s working group tasked with reviewing the country’s NBSAP, told Carbon Brief that one challenge for the country was translating the global goals of the GBF into a workable plan for the nation:
“Our situation is different from the west: what can be done there, cannot be done here. [F]or example, [the issue of] subsidies is a challenge for us – similarly, pesticides – because of our agricultural status and food-security requirements. But, still, we have kept our targets very ambitious.”
UN biodiversity chief Astrid Schomaker tells Carbon Brief and the Guardian that she expects India to announce its NBSAP during COP16.
Commenting on why so many nations have missed the deadline to submit new NBSAPs before COP16, Schomaker says that some countries have struggled to access the funding needed to prepare their plans or have been delayed by pursuing a “whole of society” approach to pulling them together. She adds:
“More NBSAPs would be better. That’s clear…These are different processes and better than we’ve had in the past.”
Major economies missing
Three of the G7 nations did not produce new NBSAPs ahead of COP16. Germany and the UK missed the deadline, while the US is not a signatory to the convention.
Missing the target time could be particularly damaging for the UK’s reputation at the negotiations. It campaigned for an ambitious agreement at COP15 and is the oceans lead of the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People group of nations.
The UK pledged to publish its NBSAP by May of this year – and even organised a launch event at Wicken Fen nature reserve in Cambridgeshire for that month – before a change of government in Scotland forced a postponement.
The release of the strategy was delayed further by a UK general election in July – and the new Labour party government now intends to publish it in the new year, as revealed by Carbon Brief earlier this month.
Although it will not now publish a new NBSAP before COP16, the UK did provide the UN with a technical document, known as a national target submission, in place of its strategy. (Around 77 countries have submitted national targets to the CBD ahead of COP16, according to Schomaker.)
When approached about missing the deadline for producing a new NBSAP ahead of COP16, a spokesperson for the Department for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) referred to the UK’s national target submission, saying:
“Nature and our wildlife underpin everything – the economy, food, health and society. That is why we have submitted the UK’s biodiversity targets to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), aligning us with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework and committing us to achieve the agreements made at COP15.”
The post COP16: More than 85% of countries miss UN deadline to submit nature pledges appeared first on Carbon Brief.
COP16: More than 85% of countries miss UN deadline to submit nature pledges
When José Antonio Kast took office as Chile’s new president in March, one of his first moves was to put the brakes on plans to expand two protected marine parks – raising doubts about the country’s high-profile bid to host the headquarters of the High Seas Treaty.
But during the UN General Assembly last month, the right-wing leader reaffirmed his leftist predecessor’s ambition for Chile to host the landmark global pact, which came into effect in January and provides a legal framework to protect the waters of the high seas beyond national jurisdiction that cover about two-thirds of the world’s oceans.
Hailing the country’s “maritime vocation”, Kast’s government said the bid to host the treaty’s secretariat in the port city of Valparaíso was state policy and testament to its commitment to multilateralism.
“For the government of Chile, it is of high interest to achieve this recognition, and we will carry out all the efforts to obtain the necessary support,” Foreign Minister Francisco Pérez Mackenna was quoted as saying by local media.
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Tough competition from Chinese, Belgian bids
But to garner the votes it needs, Chile must fend off competing bids by Belgium – which has proposed its well-connected capital, Brussels – and China, whose well-funded bid includes the provision of free premises in the coastal city of Xiamen and five years of free utility costs.
Parties to the treaty, formally called the Agreement on Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ), will choose the headquarters at their first summit (COP1), in New York from January 11 to January 22, 2027. They will seek consensus, falling back on a two-thirds majority in successive secret ballots.
Chile has offered to provide a restored waterside warehouse “at its own expense” as office space, pitching itself to developing countries as a Global South alternative to Europe-centred Brussels. Among richer countries, it is promoting its democratic credentials and greater transparency as an alternative to China.
Rolling back environmental safeguards at home?
While the South American country remains the top pick among environmental campaigners and other civil society groups, critics of Kast’s government say recent policy moves may make it harder for the country to garner the support it needs.
On March 12, the day after Kast took office, the Environment Ministry withdrew 43 decrees awaiting legal approval, including a push to expand the Mar de Juan Fernández and Nazca-Desventuradas marine parks – vast protected areas in Chile’s Pacific Ocean waters. Both remain under review, the ministry told Climate Home News.
The decrees also included an emission standard for coal power plants and regulations for Chile’s new biodiversity and protected areas service.
A month after holding up the decrees, Kast questioned aspects of Chile’s urban wetlands protection law, suggesting it was sometimes an unjustified obstacle to much-needed housing development, and his administration has also sought to ease the rules on salmon farming in the world’s second-largest producer.
In August, the Constitutional Court struck down the salmon farming reform after a challenge by opposition lawmakers and warnings from green groups including Greenpeace, which said it could help farms relocate into protected areas such as the Kawésqar National Reserve.
Valparaíso mayor Camila Nieto, from former leftist President Gabriel Boric’s party, backs the bid to host the High Seas Treaty, but said she hoped “the government’s support also translates into public policies consistent with the goals of protecting and conserving the oceans”.
“The decisions a country makes on environmental matters can influence international perceptions of its commitment to protecting the oceans. That is something we cannot ignore,” Nieto told Climate Home News.
China’s bid stirs concerns over data access, fishing
Chile’s past record on marine protection – it has protected 43% of its jurisdictional waters – could yet give it an edge.
“Chile deserves it for its conservation record as a state. For more than 15 years Chile has been following this path,” Liesbeth van der Meer, executive director at conservation group Oceana in Chile, told Climate Home News.
Concerns in some quarters about the rival bid by China – for example, over a potential conflict of interest due to the vast Chinese fishing industry – may also weigh in Chile’s favour, experts say.
Chinese-flagged vessels did about 30% of detected high seas fishing between 2022 and 2024, according to an Oceana analysis of Global Fishing Watch data. China also sponsors five of the International Seabed Authority’s 31 deep-sea mining exploration contracts, more than any other country.
The secretariat would host sensitive marine data, making transparency paramount, experts say.
China says hosting the secretariat in Xiamen would help make the treaty more globally representative, fostering cooperation between rich and developing countries and aiding equitable access to marine science and technology.
Wang Yi, China’s minister of foreign affairs, said in a statement that the country has “all along championed true multilateralism” and “firmly defended” UN institutions. Given Xiamen’s $38-billion ocean industry, the city lives up to the treaty’s “significance and promising future”, he added.
Meanwhile, Chile is proposing the treaty’s first high seas marine protected area for the Salas y Gómez and Nazca ridges, a chain of more than 110 seamounts stretching about 4,000 km from off Peru to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) that is rich in endemic fish and other marine species.
The ridges are “a true oasis of productivity”, said Carlos Gaymer, director of the Centre for Ecology and Sustainable Management of Oceanic Islands at Universidad Católica del Norte and co-author of a 2021 scientific review of the area.
The water is so clear that phytoplankton thrive around 200 metres down, feeding zooplankton, small fish and, up the chain, sharks and seabirds. Whales, turtles and sharks use the ridges as “a real highway” across the Pacific, Gaymer said. Parts of the Nazca ridge are likely nursery grounds for jack mackerel and swordfish.
Chile has already asked the body that regulates the industry in the area – the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation (SPRFMO) – to close the ridges to all fishing vessels. According to Chilean data, more than 80% of fishing in the area involves Chinese vessels.
Meeting on the Chilean request in early September, SPRFMO’s scientific committee agreed only to recommend closing the area to bottom fishing. SPRFMO’s commission will take the final decision at its next meeting, in early 2027.
For Gaymer, Chile’s push to close the area to fishing should be seen as a “starting point” for the treaty proposal.
“Every time there’s a new expedition, species new to science appear,” Gaymer said. “If you don’t protect areas like these … those species simply disappear from the planet.”
The post Race to host High Seas Treaty HQ heats up as Chile reaffirms bid appeared first on Climate Home News.
Race to host High Seas Treaty HQ heats up as Chile reaffirms bid
Mohamed Adow is the founder and director of Power Shift Africa.
What does it mean to ask a continent to adapt to a crisis it did little to create? For Africa, that question has stopped being philosophical as it is answered every day in flooded communities, failed harvests, disappearing livelihoods and public budgets stretched by disasters they cannot afford.
Africa produces a negligible share of global emissions, but between 1970 and 2021 it accounted for around 35% of climate-related deaths worldwide. The continent is therefore confronting a brutal contradiction that is exemplified by the fact that those who have contributed least to the climate crisis are carrying some of its heaviest costs.
And that explains why, for us, it is worrying that much of the climate debate treats adaptation as a technical exercise. Build better infrastructure, they say. Improve early-warning systems, they urge. Develop drought-resistant crops, they preach. Strengthen disaster preparedness, they yell. All of these things matter, but they do not answer the harder question of why some people and countries are so much more vulnerable in the first place.
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That is the question we have spent the last couple of years trying to answer, and it culminates in our recently launched thought-provoking report that shows how Africa’s vulnerability is not an accident of geography, but has instead been shaped by history, economics and power.
Colonial extraction, unequal development, debt dependency, global economic asymmetries and exclusion from international decision-making have all constrained the resources and choices available to African countries, and climate change is intensifying those existing inequalities, shows the report, titled “A Just Transition for Adaptation: A Framework and Vision for Africa”.
Widening adaptation finance gap
I say it is ‘thought-provoking’ because it asks us to rethink adaptation itself – not as a collection of projects designed to help people cope with climate impacts, but as a question of justice, power and structural change.
That distinction might not sit well with some people, but for Africa it matters, because there is a danger in asking vulnerable countries simply to become more “resilient”. Resilient against what? How can you ask people to toughen up while letting them be strangled by a system that continues to reproduce the very inequalities that have made resilience so difficult?
If you want to know where the problem is, see where the money is coming from and where it is going. That becomes quite stark when you consider the fact that Africa’s annual adaptation needs are close to $70 billion but its adaptation finance flows are only around $14 billion.
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At the same time, a growing proportion of climate finance is being delivered through commercial loans rather than grants. That means countries already under severe fiscal pressure are being asked to borrow to protect themselves from climate impacts they did little to cause.
There is something deeply wrong with a system in which climate-vulnerable countries are spending more of their own public money on adaptation than they receive in international support, because that system turns climate injustice into a financial transaction, with those least responsible carrying more of the cost.
From extractivism to African ownership
And, as the new report shows, the problem goes beyond finance. Africa’s land, minerals, forests and other resources have become central to the global transition towards lower-carbon economies. Markets and green industrial projects may offer genuine opportunities, but without African ownership, participation and accountability, there is a risk that old patterns of extraction will simply be repackaged in the language of the green economy, and that is why we argue that a transition can be low-carbon and still be unjust.
It is precisely because of this risk that the report’s idea of a just transition for adaptation becomes important as it expands the idea beyond the familiar focus on emissions and energy systems. It asks what justice looks like when the goal is not simply to reduce carbon, but to enable societies to withstand a changing climate without reproducing the inequalities that made them vulnerable.
The report places four dimensions of justice at the centre: recognition, participation, distribution and restoration.
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Recognition means taking African realities and knowledge seriously. Indigenous and local knowledge has too often been treated as peripheral to “real” climate expertise, even though communities possess generations of detailed understanding of ecosystems, rainfall, soils, water and livelihoods. That knowledge should inform adaptation policy from the beginning, rather than being added after decisions have already been made.
Participation me