As representatives from nearly 200 countries convene in Cali, Colombia for the UN’s Cop16 biodiversity summit, a critical question looms: who will foot the $700bn annual bill to save nature, and how will those funds be distributed? With the talks pushing into their second week, frustration is mounting over the lack of progress in breaking the financing deadlock.
The Steep Price of Saving Nature
Experts agree that the world needs a staggering $700bn per year to restore biodiversity and halt the destruction of ecosystems and species. This figure, which includes contributions from governments, the private sector, non-profits, and NGOs, was deemed necessary by scientists to sustainably manage the planet’s natural heritage.
However, as negotiations drag on, it’s becoming increasingly clear that no one knows where this money will come from. The landmark deal reached at Cop15 in 2022 set a target of generating $200bn annually by 2030, with wealthy nations pledging $20bn per year in public funds to developing countries by 2025. But those commitments have been slow to materialize.
Falling Short on Pledges
On Monday, dubbed “finance day” at the talks, a handful of countries including the UK, Germany, France, and Norway announced $163m in new biodiversity funding. While welcomed by campaigners, this amount falls far short of what’s needed. As Alice Jay, director of international relations at Campaign for Nature, pointed out:
“Closing the finance gap would require them to announce $300m each month from now to 2025, and then keep that up each year until 2030.”
– Alice Jay, Campaign for Nature
Oscar Soria, director of The Common Initiative thinktank, slammed the pledges as “paltry”, noting that negotiations have been gridlocked with the most contentious issues revolving around biodiversity finance. “Countries from the global south expect more from the global north,” he stressed.
The $500bn Subsidy Question
A significant portion of the $700bn target was expected to come from redirecting $500bn of environmentally harmful subsidies. The World Bank estimates that countries collectively spend $1.25tn on subsidies for industries like agriculture and fossil fuels that destroy biodiversity.
Under the Cop15 agreement, all nations were supposed to identify damaging subsidies in their public spending by 2025. However, so far only 36 countries have released this information. “This is a point on which almost no progress has been made,” lamented Soria.
The Debt Dilemma
Another thorny issue is whether increased debt should count towards the biodiversity finance targets. An uncomfortable reality is that the countries with the richest biodiversity are often the poorest and most indebted. They are increasingly borrowing to fund disaster response and adaptation in the face of climate change and ecosystem collapse.
About 80% of the increase in biodiversity funding from 2021 to 2022 came in the form of loans rather than grants. While wealthy lenders argue this provides an incentive for conservation, many activists see it as saddling developing nations with a “vicious cycle of debt” for a crisis they did not cause.
A Flawed Funding Model?
Tensions are also running high over how the limited funding that has been pledged will be distributed. Many developing countries, including Brazil and the Africa Group, are pushing for the creation of a new standalone biodiversity fund.
They argue that the current mechanism, the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund hosted within the Global Environment Facility, is controlled by wealthy donor nations and places onerous burdens on recipients. Wealthy countries, on the other hand, want to maintain the status quo. The issue nearly derailed the Cop15 deal and looks set to be a major sticking point once again.
The Ticking Clock
As Bernadette Fischler Hooper from WWF put it, finance is “the hottest of all potatoes” and “the core of the atom” around which everything else at the summit revolves. Without a major breakthrough on funding, the prospects for the overall agreement look grim.
Meanwhile, the biodiversity crisis continues to accelerate. Ecosystems are collapsing, species are going extinct at record rates, and the stability of the planet’s life support systems hangs in the balance. The world is watching to see if leaders at Cop16 can rise to this existential challenge. But as the clock ticks down, hope is fading that the summit will deliver the ambitious action and financing that is so desperately needed.
