'Question of survival': Nations discuss funding for nature at UN talks February 25, 2025

The talks are centered on a financing agreement, especially for developing countries. Photo Unsplash/ Hans-Jürgen Mager

By AFP - Agence France Presse

'Question of survival': Nations discuss funding for nature at UN talks

By Benjamin Legendre with Kelly Macnamara in Paris

Global negotiations to protect nature restarted on Tuesday with a call for humanity to come together to “sustain life on the planet” and overcome a row over funding that caused a previous meeting last year to end in disarray.

More than two years after a historic agreement on nature - including a pledge to protect 30% of the world's land and seas by 2030 - nations are still arguing over the money needed to reverse the destruction that scientists say threatens a million species.

Negotiators meeting at the headquarters of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Rome have the task of resolving an impasse between rich and developing countries over the creation of a specific fund to finance nature conservation.

Disagreement on this issue caused the previous UN COP16 negotiations in Cali, Colombia, in November to stretch on for hours and end without an agreement.

Speaking at the opening of the talks in Rome, many developing nations called for the meeting to unlock the funds and called on rich countries to fulfill their promise to provide $20 billion a year to the poorest nations by 2025.

“Without this, trust can be broken,” said Panama's representative, calling on the international community to ensure that overall funding after 2030 reflects the ‘urgency of the biodiversity crisis’.

“This is a question of survival for ecosystems, the economy, and humanity. We cannot repeat the failures of climate finance, COP16.2 must deliver more than words, it must deliver finance. The world has run out of time.

The negotiations are taking place at a time when countries are facing a range of challenges, from trade tensions and debt concerns to Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

Although Washington has not joined the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the new US president, Donald Trump, has decided to suspend development funding through the United States Agency for International Development.

The president of COP16, Susana Muhamad, called on countries to work together “towards what is probably the most important goal of humanity in the 21st century, which is our collective ability to sustain life on this planet”.

Muhamad, who has resigned as Colombia's environment minister but will remain in the post until after the COP16 conference, said she was “hopeful” of a resolution in Rome.

Far from the record 23,000 participants of the Cali conference, the negotiations resumed in a smaller format, with 1,400 people accredited and only a few hundred country representatives at the opening plenary, in a hall overlooking the rain-soaked ruins of Rome's Circus Maximus.

The countries went straight into closed-door negotiations that will last until Tuesday evening.

They have until Thursday to draw up a plan on a promised $200 billion a year in funding for nature by 2030, including $30 billion a year from the richest countries to the poorest.

The total for 2022 was around $15 billion, according to the OECD.

The debate focuses mainly on how the funding is delivered.

Developing nations - led by Brazil and the African group - want the creation of a new fund dedicated to biodiversity, claiming that they are not adequately represented in the existing mechanisms.

The rich nations - led by the European Union, Japan, and Canada - say that the creation of several funds fragments aid.

On Friday, the COP16 presidency published a new text that proposed transferring the final decision on a new fund to future UN negotiations, while suggesting reform of existing funding.

The nations outlined a series of targets for this decade, including deforestation, overexploitation of resources, climate change, pollution, and invasive species.

One of the achievements in Cali was the creation of a new fund to share the profits from the digitally sequenced genetic data of plants and animals with the communities they come from.

The fund, officially launched on Tuesday, was created so that large companies can contribute a portion of the profit or revenue they generate from developing products such as medicines and cosmetics using this data, which can amount to billions of dollars.

Ximena Barrera, from WWF Colombia, said that the fund would guarantee “direct benefits for those who have been protecting ecosystems for centuries” and was an important milestone for companies' contributions to nature.

The failure to finalize the agreement in Cali was the first in a series of disappointing results for the planet at UN summits last year.

A climate finance deal at COP29 in Azerbaijan in November was deemed disappointing, while separate negotiations on desertification and plastic pollution stalled in December.

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