A gathering of countries in Rome this week agreed on a plan to generate $200 billion US in finance a year by 2030 to halt and begin to reverse the destruction of the natural world.
The United Nations’ COP16 talks on biodiversity began last October in Colombia but failed at that time to reach an agreement on key elements, including who would contribute, how the money would be gathered and who would oversee it.
U.S. President Donald Trump is scaling back the involvement of the world’s biggest economy in development finance, so the agreement late on Thursday night was a welcome boost for global deal-making.
Led by negotiators from the so-called BRICS countries — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — the final deal saw delegates agree on a plan to find at least $200 billion US per year from a range of sources to protect nature.
Susana Muhamad, COP16 president and Colombia’s outgoing environment minister, heralded the agreement as a triumph for nature and for multilateralism in a year when the political landscape is increasingly fragmented and diplomatic frictions are growing.
“From Cali to Rome, we have sent a light of hope that still the common good, the environment and the protection of life and the capacity to come together for something bigger than the national interest is possible,” Muhamad said.
The agreement is also a win for Canadian diplomatic efforts. The finance deal is a result of a landmark agreement in Montreal in 2022, when countries agreed to protect 30 per cent of the world’s lands and oceans.
Canadian negotiators, led by federal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault, got that deal through complex and fraught negotiations involving 196 countries.
Since then, the Canadian government has pushed funding into conservation efforts at home, including an announcement on Thursday of $200 million for Inuit-led conservation in the Arctic.
Delegates also agreed to explore whether a new biodiversity fund needed to be created, as requested by some developing countries, or whether an existing fund like the one run by the Global Environment Facility would be enough. The GEF has provided more than $23 billion US to thousands of nature projects in the past 30 years.
“Everyone with the spirit of compromise made concessions, and in general for developing countries the result was very
positive,” Maria Angélica Ikeda, director of the Department of Environment at the Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Reuters as the plenary wrapped up on Thursday night.
“I come out of the meeting happy and optimistic.”
The need for action has only increased in recent years, with the average size of wildlife populations down 73 per cent since 1970, data from the World Wide Fund for Nature’s 2024 Living Planet Report shows.
The spectre of aid cuts was also felt in negotiating rooms, fuelling frustration among some countries from Brazil to Egypt and Panama that rich nations were not fulfilling their obligations to deliver grant money.
The Zoological Society of London’s policy head, Georgina Chandler, urged governments to fulfil their commitment to $30 billion US per year by 2030 to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.
The deal in Rome helps lay out the steps needed to implement the landmark Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), which was agreed to in 2022 and committed countries to a range of environmental targets.
Countries also agreed to a set of technical rules for monitoring progress toward the GBF and secured a commitment for countries to publish a national report on their biodiversity plans at the next nature conference, COP17, which will be held in Armenia in 2026.
The talks come at the start of a busy year for international climate diplomacy as countries meet at various events to discuss plastics pollution, preserving the oceans and meeting global development goals, ahead of the COP30 climate talks in November.
