In late October 2024, the UN Convention on Biodiversity held its biennial large meeting (the Conference of Parties, or COP). This convention is a sister of the better known one on climate change, both birthed in Rio in 1992, but until the last few years has languished in relative obscurity. This all changed two years ago in Montreal, which produced the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, an ambitious international agreement which aims to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030, combining protection, restoration, finance and systems transformation. This rise in prominence reflects the rising profile of the ongoing global decline in biodiversity and the need to reverse it as an existential challenge on a par with climate change. Montreal has been called the “Paris-moment” for biodiversity, referring to the signature role the 2016 climate COP in that city had in solidifying ambitions for stabilizing climate and shaping goals of net-zero carbon emissions.
This COP was the opportunity to further develop mechanisms for how the Global Biodiversity Framework would work, as well for countries to present their national biodiversity pledges as promised in Montreal. This was an “implementation COP” focused on working out the delivery mechanisms of the Global Biodiversity Framework. It was always unlikely to catch major global press attention. Things are slow, but the meeting itself provides a stimulus for progress, such as a timeline for to announce targets and showcase pledges.
It is easy to be sceptical about these international meetings, their slow progress and insufficiently resourced ambitions, but what is gradually emerging and solidifying is a global framework for governance of biodiversity. The international UN process certainly can’t solve this on its own, but it does provide an essential global architecture. Ultimately, nations and businesses need to deliver against these targets, but a process is built to create targets and build international mechanisms for finance and monitoring. Multilateral negotiations and agreements are essential but deeply inefficient and frequently frustrating, but also provide a space for smaller countries, and for indigenous peoples and other groups to have a voice at the table.
This year, the meeting was held in the city of Cali in Colombia, tucked in the forest-clad eastern foothills of the Western Cordillera of the Andes, fittingly one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. Lush tropical montane forest stretches above the city, a tree-lined river runs through like a throbbing green vein, surging after the frequent and heavy tropical downpours. This stunning, friendly city has a troubled history and it was gamble for the Colombian government to locate it here, a gamble which I believe paid off admirably. I came to support the activities of the London Natural History Museum, of which I am a Trustee, and to also better understand this emerging global biodiversity architecture and how our activities at Oxford University (including our Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery) can address and support these goals.
I have been to some climate change COPs previously, but to newcomers these COPs can be overwhelming. COPs are split into a Blue Zone, accessible only to negotiators and to a limited quota of observers from sectors such as NGOs, academics, media and business, and a Green Zone freely open to all. In Cali the Blue Zone was in a lovely conference area semi-open to views of the lush green hills, a welcome antidote to the nature-free, soul-sucking sterility of many large conference venues. The Green zone was in the heart of the city, in a range of venues clustered around a pedestrianized area joyously hugging the river.
What was achieved in this COP?
Only a small fraction of countries (44 out of 196) have submitted their detailed national biodiversity pledges (National Biodiversity Strategies and Application Plans – NBSAPs in the jargon loved by the negotiations). A larger number (119) have produced less detailed national targets. How biodiversity action can be financed in ways that transfer resources from the resource-rich Global North to the biodiversity-rich Global South, always the thorniest question, still needs to be fleshed out. The meeting ran out of time before all business was completed, with the aim of completing unfinished business in the next two years.
There were two big outcomes:
- Firstly, an agreement on Digital Sequence Information that sets a principle and precedent for companies (such as pharmaceutical companies) that use genetic information to ensure small fraction of their revenue is shared fairly with the people living where the resources were discovered, including Indigenous groups, supporting the conservation of such biological wealth.
- Secondly, the creation of a permanent body to represent the voices of indigenous peoples and local communities within the framework.
The negotiations are important and essential and there is some excellent coverage of them and their outcomes (I highly recommend the comprehensive analysis and summary by Carbon Brief). Rather than repeat those summaries, here I will focus on two other aspects of the conference that I think get less international attention or understanding by non-participants. In effect, there are at least two other processes going on in parallel to the negotiations.
One is essentially a conference on biodiversity that brings together governments, policymakers, NGOs, academics, journalists, indigenous peoples, activists, businesses and finance in a somewhat overwhelming flurry of events that stretch from the Blue Zone right across the city. These don’t get the coverage of the main negotiations because they are so amorphous and hard to track. But this is where a lot of the detailed consequences of the Global Biodiversity Framework, and wider thinking about the biodiversity challenge, are being worked out. For example, I attended one session on how researchers are rising to the challenge of developing a global biodiversity data architecture that brings together multiple sources of data and will support and simplify how countries can track and report changes in their biodiversity.
Another session I attended was on how ecosystem restoration activities can be scaled up to meet the target of restoration of 30% of degraded lands by 2030. And another on whether novel approaches based on the intrinsic rights of natural entities (rivers, mountains etc.) can be effective and integrated into national laws and legal systems. And there was a plethora of smaller but hugely significant events such as Brazil launching its plan to restore 12 million ha of its ecosystems by 2035, and presentations of a new mechanism to finance tropical forest protection and restoration. And, even more amorphous, sprinkled in every day were multiple conversations and serendipitous encounters, new agreements to collaborate together on something, new plans being hatched. And the meetings and conversations stretch across disciplines – as an academic I know of no other forum where I can engage so effortlessly with governments, activists, NGOs, journalists and filmmakers.
To the outside this “conference of biodiversity” may seem superfluous to the main negotiations, especially in an age where air travel is rightly being questioned and many have taken the decision to not travel. But I can’t see the speed of activity and collaboration required to address the biodiversity challenge happening in any other way, especially when creating partnerships across countries.
The third element that matters is the use of the event as an opportunity for mobilization of public awareness, activism and enthusiasm. This was evident in the UK around the Glasgow climate COP in 2021. Biodiversity has languished compared to climate change, but in the last few years it has stepped up a notch with “nature” being a prominent part of public conversation, both in the UK and internationally. But there is so much more to be done. The Colombian government made this explicit in declaring this “the people’s COP”, and they truly delivered. The Green Zone, in the heart of the city, on the pedestrianized streets straddling the Cali river, was packed with stalls and information stands and humming with joy and music ranging from salsa through Afro-Colombian choirs and Andean flutes. Throughout the COP this zone teemed with the public, enjoying the event but also learning and celebrating biodiversity and the natural world. And there were many other events.
I joined the British Ambassador to Colombia in opening the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year Exhibition. It was free and easy to walk into off the street: every time I passed by it was full of people enjoying this celebration of the wonders of the natural world. The media coverage in Colombia was intense and joyous, and also there was good coverage in Brazil, and I believe in other parts of Latin America. As an ecologist it was truly wondrous to see such a public and joyous celebration of nature and its importance. It was disappointing there was less media coverage in the UK, something that is needed if we are to better mainstream nature and biodiversity into the public conversation.
At the end of the meeting, I took a trip out with a local conservationist to the lush cloud forests in the mountains above Cali, and to the tropical dry forests and wetlands to the north of the city. Everywhere was brimming with life, a celebration of the abundance and exuberance of the living world. It was also filled with stories of hope and progress. A forest that had been protected and restored for the protection it supplies to the city’s water supply, and is now found to be home to one of the planet’s rarest birds, discovered only in 2019 (we got to see this charismatic little bird that struts and swings its torso like a salsa dancer – hence its nickname of the “salsita”) and an abundance of gorgeous plants and insects. City ecologists who are implementing ambitious plans for green corridors and public access to nature. A river with multiple tragic stories from past violence but now a focus of community-led projects for reconciliation and reconnection. But also sobering reminders of wider challenges: a bird-rich wetland experiencing two years of continuous drought, hill-sides razed by cattle-gazing and fire, intensive sugar-cane monocultures stretching across the valley.
Amongst the local people (“Caleños”) that I met there was immense pride and joy that Cali was being celebrated as a city of biodiversity, and lending its name and legacy to global efforts to protect and restore the natural world. Biodiversity and nature recovery are ultimately always local and intimate, but they cannot only be local. Somehow, we need to bridge the scales from local to national to global, to try and shift not only global nature governance and finance, but also the values of our modern civilizations, to rebuild our connections with nature, and retell and build new stories about how the natural world is not primarily a commodity, a source of resource extraction to power our economies, but the nurturing matrix from which we emerge and which sustains us. This was apparent in the cosmovisions of many of the indigenous peoples who spoke at the meeting. The whole meeting had the strap-line of “paz con la naturaleza”, peace with nature. The President of the COP, the inspiring Colombian Minister of the Environment Susana Muhamad, spoke of the need to live in synchrony with the cycles of nature. The UN secretary general spoke of ending a war with nature.
After spending ten days in the company of people, both delegates and locals, with so much love for the natural world, in a beautiful, seductive, magical country that is sadly far too familiar with conflict but also with reconciliation and peace-making, I come home energized and empowered. This felt significant. There is so so much to do, but I feel this was an important moment in addressing the huge challenge of creating civilizational and just peace with nature.
LCNR’s commitment to the partnership was buoyed by the participation of our ecologists who conducted strategic drone flights (LIDAR and multi-spectral sensors) to generate information on vegetation to support the refinement of KLRP and serve as a baseline for future monitoring of impacts. The sustained engagement of our social science team laid a critical foundation for effective data collection on the ‘dronescapes’. The team has also been instrumental in observing and providing essential inputs towards Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) processes required to effectively set up the KLRP and improve the inclusion of local communities’ needs and concerns.