Confident of biodiversity finance deal in ‘early 2025’, says COP16 president

BAKU – The Colombian president of the COP16 UN conference on biodiversity expressed confidence on Nov 16 that a key financial accord for species protection could be reached “in the first quarter of 2025”.

Delegates failed to agree on a financial road map at the Cali summit in Colombia earlier in November.

But the COP16 president, Colombia’s Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, told Agence France-Presse on the sidelines of the COP29 climate talks in Baku, Azerbaijan, she was confident of an agreement early in 2025.

The 196 member countries of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity left Cali two weeks ago unable to agree a financial plan to bolster efforts to halt the destruction of nature by 2030, despite discussion overrunning by hours.

Instead, participants adopted a plan for a multilateral fund designed to be supplemented by private firms profiting from the digital sequencing of genome source information.

Ms Muhamad noted that this in itself constituted a “groundmaking mechanism” to foster investment in biodiversity conservation. There had been further progress on setting a wider road map to finance biodiversity, she added.

“Hopefully, in the next plenary, we should be (able) in the first quarter of next year to close COP16 (and) we will be able to get to that agreement... in the first quarter of 2025,” she told AFP.

A formal signing of the dossier would likely come at the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, she added.

The Cali summit drew an unprecedented 23,000 participants to the largest summit yet on biodiversity seeking to push beyond the timid application of the Kunming-Montreal accord two years ago to save the planet from deforestation, overexploitation, climate change and pollution. AFP