COP16 Roundup - ISEP CEO Reflects on the key highlights and takeaways

Two weeks of negotiations, hundreds of thousands of air miles flown, Ministers and heads of state attending, and yet, in the end, the United Nations biodiversity talks, COP16, in Cali in Columbia ended up as slightly less than the sum of its parts. Although there was some agreement, ultimately negotiations had to be suspended because the meeting was no longer quorate, leaving many important issues unresolved.

Let's start with what was agreed. Firstly, digital sequence information (DSI). Genetic information, digitally stored, is increasingly being used by agricultural and pharmaceutical companies in their quest to find new products.

The DSI agreement sets up a process whereby some companies will need to contribute 1% of their profits or 0.1% of their revenue into a fund to support the countries from where the data is gathered (these are usually nature rich and developing). 

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Whilst some negotiators believe that this could raise up to $1bn annually, the deal is voluntary, and the rules will have to be introduced at a domestic level. Some seasoned commentators are fairly sceptical as to the amount of money that will be raised.

Secondly, the Indigenous peoples and local communities grouping has been given its own permanent body status, meaning that they have their own permanent role in the negotiations. 

This was a decision that was greeted with unconfined joy by the Indigenous peoples still in the room. For many years they have had to be part of individual country delegations to have a chance of making their case.

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However, many of these central agreements from COP15 remain unresolved.

  • Firstly, there has been very little progress in raising the $200 billion a year to fund nature protection, agreed at the previous COP. This included a transfer of around $20 billion a year from richer to developing countries. This was one of the key areas that negotiators from developing countries I spoke to were hoping would be resolved in Colombia.

  • Secondly, there was also no agreement on how biodiversity targets would be monitored, something that negotiators that I have spoken to are bitterly disappointed about.

  • Thirdly, there has been no approval of the Convention on Biological Diversity budget. 

Part of this lack of decision-making highlights the gap between richer and developing countries. Negotiations at these international events always overrun, but the delegations for many developing world nations were on fixed plane tickets on Saturday that they could not afford to change (unlike western delegations, who had both the money and the capacity to stay on longer).

The same was true in the negotiations itself, where developing countries could only afford to send a few negotiators, meaning the floor was held in many of the negotiating tracks by those countries who had the manpower to physically be in all the conversations at the same time.

As one negotiator from a sub-Saharan African country told me: "I cannot physically be in more than one place at the same time, and sometimes I find that decisions are made that I would not agree with simply because I was not in the room. It may seem like a small point to make when the outcome of these talks has been so disappointing, but it is an important one if these negotiations are to fully reflect a global consensus."

The next biodiversity COP is not scheduled until 2026 in Armenia, but there will now have to be another meeting next year in order to conclude the talks that should have finished over the weekend. Given the huge progress that seemed to have been made at the last COP in Montreal, this was never going to be as spectacular a set of decisions.

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But it is hugely disappointing for countries and campaigners everywhere that the Cali COP fizzled out in quite such a fashion.


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Sarah Mukherjee AISEP

CEO

Sarah Mukherjee MBE is the CEO of ISEP. Previously Sarah was the BBC’s Environment correspondent, presenting on national and international BBC radio and television, winning awards across the world. After leaving the corporation, she held leadership roles in various sectors including utilities and agriculture. Sarah was a panel member for the National Parks Review and the Glover Review and also sat on the National Food Strategy Advisory Panel. She is co-chair of the Natural England Landscape Advisory Panel as well as Non-executive Director on the Board of the Environment Agency. In 2021 Sarah was awarded an MBE for her services to agriculture and farmer well-being. Since joining ISEP Sarah has been instrumental in implementing a Diverse Sustainability Initiative (DSI) strategy. In her spare time, Sarah enjoys martial arts, has been a 'Campaign for Real Ale' judge, as well as a rugby reporter.