Written by Olivia Nater | Published: March 14, 2025
The 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP16) caused widespread disappointment when it concluded in Cali, Colombia, last November, because it failed to reach a meaningful agreement on financing conservation efforts. Follow-up negotiations took place in Rome, Italy, this February, which were more successful — governments adopted the first global strategy to finance biodiversity protection. Let’s take a look at what was agreed upon and whether it is enough to halt nature loss.
The UN CBD is the nature-equivalent of the United Nations Framework to Combat Climate Change (UNFCCC). Both UN bodies host yearly “COPs” or “Conferences of the Parties” which bring together delegates from around the world to advance multilateral efforts to protect nature (UN CBD) and fight climate change (UNFCCC). While the climate COPs benefit from a lot of media attention, their biodiversity counterparts are less talked about, reflecting a lack of awareness of the seriousness of the extinction crisis.
Unfortunately, due to Republican resistance to international treaties, the US is one of only two countries that are not parties to the UN CBD (the other is the Vatican).
The 15th CBD Conference of the Parties (COP15), which took place in Montreal in 2022, was widely considered a landmark moment as it resulted in the “Paris Agreement for nature,” the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which aims to protect 30 percent of all land and marine areas by 2030. (While the US is not a CBD member, former president Biden had set the same “30×30” target nationally, which was killed by Trump as soon as he took office.)
Under the GBF, delegates also agreed to increase conservation funding from all public and private sources to at least $200 billion per year by 2030. Included in this commitment is a contribution of $20 billion per year from wealthy to developing countries, which is supposed to increase to at least $30 billion by 2030. The GBF also calls for reducing subsidies that harm nature (such as for oil and gas developments) by at least $500 billion per year by 2030.
The GBF doesn’t lay out how these finance targets are supposed to be achieved, however. Hence, hashing out a financing mechanism was a priority at COP16.
The funding gap between the amount of money needed to end biodiversity loss and the amount the world actually spends for positive biodiversity outcomes is massive, estimated at a minimum of $700 billion per year.
On top of that, rich countries are not sending enough financial support to low-income nations which are home to some of the world’s most important and endangered biodiversity hotspots. As of 2022 (the latest year for which data is available), only $10.95 billion in biodiversity funding reached developing countries. In light of the Trump-precipitated geopolitical crisis, including the complete dismantling of USAID, as well as aid budget cuts in the UK and other European countries, it seems unlikely that the $30 billion by 2030 target will be reached.
Lack of strong and reliable financial support for developing countries, as well as the question of whether well-off emerging economies should contribute to the fund, have been major points of contention at the biodiversity COPs — just like at the climate COPs.
The agreement coming out of Rome at least lays out a (rather vague) strategy for mobilizing financial resources that recommends scaling up investments, reforming subsidies, and strengthening financial mechanisms. The meeting also produced a monitoring framework to track progress towards the implementation of the GBF via a set of indicators that countries can use to assess the effectiveness of their national biodiversity plans.
While these agreements aren’t legally binding, they nevertheless move the needle in the right direction and have been widely hailed as a much-needed victory for multilateralism during these tumultuous times.
Just like the climate COPs’ repeated failure to slash greenhouse gas emissions, the international biodiversity negotiations aren’t yielding the strong commitments and actions needed to halt the sixth mass extinction. A WWF report published last October revealed that vertebrate wildlife populations have plummeted by an average of 73 percent since 1970 — up from the 69 percent drop estimated in the previous assessment published in 2022.
The hard truth is that biodiversity loss is still accelerating due to our failure to address its root cause: ecological overshoot driven by overconsumption and overpopulation. International agreements will only have truly meaningful, lasting impacts if they lead to the transformational systemic change that is needed to tackle the polycrisis.
