Two years after coming to a historic agreement to “halt and reverse” nature loss, countries are preparing to gather in Cali, Colombia for the latest round of UN biodiversity talks.
The COP16 biodiversity summit – officially, the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity – will run from 21 October to 1 November. Around 14,000 delegates are expected to attend the talks in Colombia’s third most populous city.
At the previous summit, COP15, which was held in Montreal in December 2022, countries agreed to the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF). The GBF is a set of four goals and 23 targets with the overarching mission of reversing the decline of biodiversity around the world by 2030.
Up for negotiating in Cali will be a range of issues, including some traditionally contentious topics, such as finance for nature and the rules governing the access to digital sequence information.
But other issues, such as a global review of progress towards the goals and targets agreed at COP15 and the monitoring framework needed to assess said progress, will be new to the negotiating agenda in Colombia.
Unlike at COP15, around 10 heads of state are expected to attend the Cali summit, Carbon Brief understands.
To produce a “who wants what” interactive table, Carbon Brief has conducted an assessment of the key negotiating issues and the positions that various countries and negotiating blocs hold.
The first column shows the country, negotiating bloc or non-state actor. Note that negotiating blocs at UN biodiversity summits are far less formal than they are at climate summits.
The second column shows the major topics that will be discussed during the negotiations, while the third column lists more specific issues that fall under each of these topics.
The final column indicates the position that each grouping is likely to take on a particular issue at the summit. This ranges from “strongly support” – meaning the grouping is likely to be strongly pushing the issue – to “red line”, which means the grouping is likely to oppose this issue and show no room for compromise.
After the interactive table below, some of the key negotiating topics are explained.
(This is a “living document” that will be updated during the course of the summit. To suggest additions or amendments to the table, please email cropped@carbonbrief.org.)
Biodiversity finance
Finance is expected to be the running undercurrent throughout the COP16 biodiversity talks.
One biodiversity finance topic that will be closely watched is the level of commitment made by developed countries towards raising “at least $20bn a year” by 2025 for conservation in developing countries.
To date, only seven developed countries have contributed to the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), for a total of $244m.
In the run-up to Cali, Colombia’s environment minister and COP16 president Susana Muhamad “urged” governments from the global north to “make a gesture to increase trust in the conference and actually put their money” in the fund.
At the same time, some developing countries have reiterated their call for a separate fund under the direct authority of the COP to meet their needs.
Just as some countries are cautioning against “double-counting” of biodiversity development finance, others are calling for better monitoring of “private financing”, underlining that market mechanisms such as biodiversity offsets and credits cannot substitute for public finance flows from north to south.
Market mechanisms have also received increased pushback from countries and Indigenous groups in the run-up to Cali.
NBSAPs, global review and global report
At COP15, countries agreed to publish new plans for how they will tackle biodiversity loss and meet the goals of the GBF. They are called “national biodiversity strategies and action plans”, or “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 agreed in 2011.
But Carbon Brief analysis shows that the vast majority of countries are set to miss the deadline to publish a new NBSAP ahead of COP16. Only a handful of countries have so produced NBSAPs, although Carbon Brief understands that several more will publish them during the summit.
In Cali, negotiators will need to grapple with countries’ collective failure to produce new NBSAPs and decide how to move forward.
At COP15, countries also agreed that a global analysis of NBSAPs should take place at COP16 and “subsequent COPs”.
A “global review” should then take place at COP17 in 2026 and COP19 in 2030, according to documents signed off by countries in Montreal.
At COP16, countries will need to negotiate the finer details of how these global reports and reviews should be conducted.
Digital sequence information
A subject that will be key to the success of COP16 is the negotiation on digital sequence information (DSI) from genetic resources – and how to fairly and equitably share the benefits derived from biodiversity’s rich genetic wealth.
In August this year, negotiators met in Montreal for five days of gruelling talks to streamline options for a one-of-a-kind global multilateral benefit-sharing mechanism (GMBSM) and a global fund.
While the meeting yielded a 29-paragraph draft decision for COP16, these options will need to be whittled down to reach a final outcome in Cali, in order to make both mechanism and fund operational.
Of these, the most critical and contested are whether benefit-sharing from DSI is voluntary or legally binding and how the mechanism will interact with national laws and measures around DSI.
Another key issue is whether the mechanism should cover all “public databases”.
While blocs such as the EU favour open-access databases, the African Group has proposed the CBD set up its own database, where DSI is made publicly available only with the prior consent of providers of genetic material.
Who pays into the fund, where the fund is housed, how benefits should be triggered, where money should flow and what it is spent on are other major points of divergence that observers expect will flare up in Cali, with ramifications for industry, academia and governments.
Countries have also differed on how the mechanism will promote access to non-monetary benefits, such as building capacity, sharing medicines or the transfer of climate-critical technologies developed with the use of DSI.
Monitoring framework
A critical component of assessing the world’s progress towards the goals and targets of the GBF is the monitoring framework.
For each goal and target, the current draft of the monitoring framework sets out options for one or more “headline” or “binary” indicators. (Headline indicators are based on sub-national, national, regional or global data, while binary indicators use yes/no questions to assess progress for targets that are not easily quantifiable.)
The framework also includes component and complementary indicators, which it says can be used to track specific aspects of progress that are not well-captured by the headline indicators.
In addition to holding differing opinions on how progress towards individual targets should be measured, countries are divided on how prescriptive the monitoring framework should be.
Many global-south countries feel that the monitoring approach should be flexible and voluntary, to account for differences in capabilities and resources between countries.
Additionally, lower-income countries are adamant that the monitoring framework must be accompanied by an ambitious finance package so that they can fulfil their obligations under the GBF.
Indigenous rights
Indigenous rights are set to be a priority theme at COP16.
Colombia’s presidency has stated that the summit “will contribute to the strengthening guarantees of recognition for Indigenous peoples and local communities” (IPLCs).
The inclusion of IPLCs within the negotiations is a priority for many countries, with some strongly supporting that they be “explicitly recognised” throughout the decisions.
Biodiversity financial mechanisms that benefit IPLCs are another major goal for these communities and bodies, with several constituencies requesting that IPLCs be able to directly access funds.
Several countries are also asking for the inclusion of “free, prior and informed consent” – namely, the right of IPLCs to be consulted on projects affecting their territories and grant or withhold their consent – within discussions about knowledge management, DSI and biodiversity finance.
Related to that is the recognition of traditional knowledge for biodiversity conservation and sustainable use, held by IPLCs, including Afro-descendant and other ethnic groups.
Other issues
COP16 has a packed agenda, with various other issues for nations to discuss alongside the topics described above.
Countries could, for example, sign off on a global action plan on biodiversity and health, which has been negotiated over the past few years. This plan sets out a number of voluntary actions aiming to boost the profile of the ties between biodiversity and health.
At COP15, countries agreed to produce an updated version of the plan, based on inputs from different governments and stakeholders, such as Indigenous peoples and local communities.
A new draft has since been put together and is ready to be negotiated – and potentially signed off – in Cali.
Other items on the agenda include texts on the links between biodiversity and climate change, plus ways to combine efforts to tackle these and other interconnected issues.
At the COP28 climate summit in Dubai last year, the three presidents of the climate change, biodiversity and desertification COPs released a joint statement on climate, nature and people.
The countries that signed this statement promised “comprehensiveness and coherence” between their NBSAPs and their next national climate pledges, or NDCs, which are due to be submitted before COP30 in 2025.
Colombia has called for these pledges to be combined to ease the workload of putting them together and increase “synergies”, reports Reuters.
Invasive alien species, scientific and technical cooperation and challenges to the implementation of the GBF are among the other issues up for discussion in Cali.
The post Interactive: Who wants what at the COP16 biodiversity summit appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Interactive: Who wants what at the COP16 biodiversity summit
Climate Change
IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs
A slower shift to clean energy could leave the world with 1.3 million fewer energy sector jobs by 2035 compared with a scenario in which governments fully implement their green policies, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has found.
In its annual World Energy Employment report, the Paris-based watchdog said on Friday that the Current Policies Scenario (CPS), which it reintroduced under pressure from the Trump administration, has “more muted” employment growth than the Stated Policies Scenario.
The CPS sees oil and gas demand continuing to rise until at least 2050 – a scenario that the IEA described as “cautious” and “anchored in enacted laws and measures” and was widely criticised by clean energy experts.
A fast energy transition would spur investment in construction, creating more jobs across the sector. New roles for electricians, building insulators, solar panel and energy-efficient lightbulb installers, and transition mineral miners would more than offset job losses in coal mines, power plants and oil and gas fields, the report found.
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Anabella Rosemberg, Just Transition lead at Climate Action Network International, lamented that the clean energy sector is “being undermined at a time when employment creation is of utmost priority”.
“Climate ambition and decent job creation must go hand in hand – but as the recent conversations at COP30 showed, there is a need for both the right targets and just transition strategies to make it happen,” she added.
A more ambitious Net Zero Emissions scenario, aligned with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global warming to 1.5C, would see roughly ten million more energy jobs created than under the CPS, report author Daniel Wetzel told Climate Home News at a press conference.
Bottleneck warnings
The IEA warned that governments must act to train workers for these roles or risk facing shortages of electricians, welders, and grid specialists – a gap that could slow the energy transition and drive up wages and energy costs.
IEA head Fatih Birol highlighted a particular shortage of qualified workers in the nuclear industry, warning that the problem could worsen as the sector’s workforce continues to age. “I hear nuclear is making a comeback, but the interest in the nuclear sector for the jobs is rather weak,” he said.
Laura Cozzi, IEA’s Director of Sustainability, Technology and Outlooks, warned of a shortage of skilled workers in electricity grids. “That is one of the key ingredients why we are not seeing grids ramp up as [they] should,” she said. Over 60 governments pledged at COP29 to improve and expand their grids to enable clean electricity to flow to where it is needed.
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Bert De Wel, Global Coordinator for Climate Policy at the International Trade Union Confederation, celebrated that the energy transition is creating jobs but added that they should be good jobs with decent pay, conditions and union rights. Decent work would attract skilled workers, he added.
The report found that wages in the oil and gas industry have generally risen faster over the past year than in the solar – and especially the wind – sectors. It noted that the oil and gas industry has a “historical tendency to offer highly competitive wages to attract and retain top talent”.
At the COP30 climate summit, governments agreed to set up the Belém Action Mechanism to try and make the energy transition fairer to groups such as workers in the energy industry. It will give trade unions a formal role in shaping just transition policies, for what the ITUC says is the first time.
ITUC General Secretary Luc Triangle called it a “decisive win for the union movement and working people across the world, in all sectors but especially those in transition industries.”
The post IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs appeared first on Climate Home News.
IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs
Climate Change
DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Deadly floods in Asia
MOUNTING DEVASTATION: The Associated Press reported that the death toll from catastrophic floods in south-east Asia had reached 1,500, with Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand most affected and hundreds still missing. The newswire said “thousands” more face “severe” food and clean-water shortages. Heavy rains and thunderstorms are expected this weekend, it added, with “saturated soil and swollen rivers leaving communities on edge”. Earlier in the week, Bloomberg said the floods had caused “at least $20bn in losses”.
CLIMATE CHANGE LINKS: A number of outlets have investigated the links between the floods and human-caused climate change. Agence France-Presse explained that climate change was “producing more intense rain events because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture and warmer oceans can turbocharge storms”. Meanwhile, environmental groups told the Associated Press the situation had been exacerbated by “decades of deforestation”, which had “stripped away natural defenses that once absorbed rainfall and stabilised soil”.
‘NEW NORMAL’: The Associated Press quoted Malaysian researcher Dr Jemilah Mahmood saying: “South-east Asia should brace for a likely continuation and potential worsening of extreme weather in 2026 and for many years.” Al Jazeera reported that the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies had called for “stronger legal and policy frameworks to protect people in disasters”. The organisation’s Asia-Pacific director said the floods were a “stark reminder that climate-driven disasters are becoming the new normal”, the outlet said.
Around the world
- REVOKED: The UK and Netherlands withdrew $2.2bn of financial backing from a controversial liquified natural gas (LNG) project in Mozambique, Reuters reported. The Guardian noted that TotalEnergies’ “giant” project stood accused of “fuelling the climate crisis and deadly terror attacks”.
- REVERSED: US president Donald Trump announced plans to “significantly weaken” Biden-era fuel efficiency requirements for cars, the New York Times said.
- RESTRICTED: EU leaders agreed to ban the import of Russian gas from autumn 2027, the Financial Times reported. Meanwhile, Reuters said it is “likely” the European Commission will delay announcing a plan on auto sector climate targets next week, following pressure to “weaken” a 2035 cut-off for combustion engines.
- RETRACTED: An influential Nature study that looked at the economic consequences of climate change has been withdrawn after “criticism from peers”, according to Bloomberg. [The research came second in Carbon Brief’s ranking of the climate papers most covered by the media in 2024.]
- REBUKED: The federal government of Canada faced a backlash over an oil pipeline deal struck last week with the province of Alberta. CBC News noted that First Nations chiefs voted “unanimously” to demand the withdrawal of the deal and Canada’s National Observer quoted author Naomi Klein as saying that the prime minister was “completely trashing Canada’s climate commitments”.
- RESCHEDULED: The Indonesian government has cancelled plans to close a coal plant seven years early, Bloomberg reported. Meanwhile, Bloomberg separately reported that India is mulling an “unprecedented increase” in coal-power capacity that could see plants built “until at least 2047”.
$518 billion a year
The projected coastal flood damages for the Asia-Pacific region by 2100 if current policies continue, according to a Scientific Reports study covered this week by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- More than 100 “climate-sensitive rivers” worldwide are experiencing “large and severe changes in streamflow volume and timing” | Environmental Research Letters
- Africa’s forests have switched from a carbon sink into a source | Scientific Reports
- Increasing urbanisation can “substantially intensify warming”, contributing up to 0.44C of additional temperature rise per year through 2060 | Communications Earth & Environment
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
A new target for developed nations to triple adaptation finance by 2035, agreed at the COP30 climate summit, would not cover more than a third of developing countries’ estimated needs, Carbon Brief analysis showed. The chart above compares a straight line to meeting the adaptation finance target (blue), alongside an estimate of countries’ adaptation needs (grey), which was calculated using figures from the latest UN Environmental Programme adaptation gap report, based on countries’ UN climate plans (called “nationally determined contributions” or NDCs) and national adaptation plans (NAPs).
Spotlight
Inclusivity at the IPCC
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to an IPCC lead author researching ways to improve the experience of global south scientists taking part in producing the UN climate body’s assessments.
Hundreds of climate scientists from around the world met in Paris this week to start work on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC’s) newest set of climate reports.
The IPCC is the UN body responsible for producing the world’s most authoritative climate science reports. Hundreds of scientists from across the globe contribute to each “assessment cycle”, which sees researchers aim to condense all published climate science over several years into three “working group” reports.
The reports inform the decisions of governments – including at UN climate talks – as well as the public understanding of climate change.
The experts gathering in Paris are the most diverse group ever convened by the IPCC.
Earlier this year, Carbon Brief analysis found that – for the first time in an IPCC cycle – citizens of the global south make up 50% of authors of the three working group reports. The IPCC has celebrated this milestone, with IPCC chair Prof Jim Skea touting the seventh assessment report’s (AR7’s) “increased diversity” in August.
But some IPCC scientists have cautioned that the growing involvement of global south scientists does not translate into an inclusive process.
“What happens behind closed doors in these meeting rooms doesn’t necessarily mirror what the diversity numbers say,” Dr Shobha Maharaj, a Trinidadian climate scientist who is a coordinating lead author for working group two (WG2) of AR7, told Carbon Brief.
Global south perspective
Motivated by conversations with colleagues and her own “uncomfortable” experience working on the small-islands chapter of the sixth assessment cycle (AR6) WG2 report, Maharaj – an adjunct professor at the University of Fiji – reached out to dozens of fellow contributors to understand their experience.
The exercise, she said, revealed a “dominance of thinking and opinions from global north scientists, whereas the global south scientists – the scientists who were people of colour – were generally suppressed”.
The perspectives of scientists who took part in the survey and future recommendations for the IPCC are set out in a peer-reviewed essay – co-authored by 20 researchers – slated for publication in the journal PLOS Climate. (Maharaj also presented the findings to the IPCC in September.)
The draft version of the essay notes that global south scientists working on WG2 in AR6 said they confronted a number of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) issues, including “skewed” author selection, “unequal” power dynamics and a “lack of respect and trust”. The researchers also pointed to logistical constraints faced by global south authors, such as visa issues and limited access to journals.
The anonymous quotations from more than 30 scientists included in the essay, Maharaj said, are “clear data points” that she believes can advance a discussion about how to make academia more inclusive.
“The literature is full of the problems that people of colour or global south authors have in academia, but what you don’t find very often is quotations – especially from climate scientists,” she said. “We tend to be quite a conservative bunch.”
Road to ‘improvement’
Among the recommendations set out in the essay are for DEI training, the appointment of a “diversity and inclusion ombudsman” and for updated codes of conduct.
Marharaj said that these “tactical measures” need to occur alongside “transformative approaches” that help “address value systems, dismantle power structures [and] change the rules of participation”.
With drafting of the AR7 reports now underway, Maharaj said she is “hopeful” the new cycle can be an improvement on the last, pointing to a number of “welcome” steps from the IPCC.
This includes holding the first-ever expert meeting on DEI this autumn, new mechanisms where authors can flag concerns and the recruitment of a “science and capacity officer” to support WG2 authors.
The hope, Maharaj explained, is to enhance – not undermine – climate science.
“The idea here was to move forward and to improve the IPCC, rather than attack it,” she said. “Because we all love the science – and we really value what the IPCC brings to the world.”
Watch, read, listen
BROKEN PROMISES: Climate Home News spoke to communities in Nigeria let down by the government’s failure to clean up oil spills by foreign companies.
‘WHEN A ROAD GOES WRONG’: Inside Climate News looked at how a new road from Brazil’s western Amazon to Peru has become a “conduit for rampant deforestation and illegal gold mining”.
SHADOWY COURTS: In the Guardian, George Monbiot lamented the rise of investor-state dispute settlements, which he described as “undemocratic offshore tribunals” that are already having a “chilling effect” on countries’ climate ambitions.
Coming up
- 1-12 December: UN Environment Assembly 7, Nairobi, Kenya
- 7 December: Hong Kong legislative elections
- 11 December: Falkland Islands legislative assembly elections
Pick of the jobs
- Greenpeace International, engagement manager – climate and energy | Salary: Unknown. Location: Various
- The Energy, newsletter editor | Salary: Unknown. Location: Australia (remote)
- University of Groningen, PhD position in motivating people to contribute to societal transitions | Salary: €3,059-€3,881 per month. Location: Groningen, the Netherlands
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Climate Change
Alabama Regulators Approve Two-Year Electric Rate Freeze and Two Solar Projects for a Meta Inc. Data Center
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IEA: Slow transition away from fossil fuels would cost over a million energy sector jobs
DeBriefed 5 December: Deadly Asia floods; Adaptation finance target examined; Global south IPCC scientists speak out
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