Negotiations on how to implement the ambitious Kunming-Montreal agreement on nature protection were still deadlocked on Thursday, October 31, less than forty-eight hours before the conclusion of the 16th.my world conference on biodiversity (COP16). Before leaving Colombia on Wednesday, the French Minister for the Ecological Transition, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, expressed her ” concern “evoking “Not so encouraging signs”.
Not surprisingly, the confrontation between North and South is mainly about financing. With one issue of tension in particular: developing countries, including Brazil and African states, are calling for the creation of a new fund dedicated to biodiversity, while the European Union and most donor countries are strongly opposed. Diplomats are trying to find a compromise solution to ensure that neither side loses face.
If the issue of the most vulnerable countries’ access to the resources they need is crucial, it tends to overshadow another financial issue: that of subsidies that are harmful to the environment. “There is a lot of debate about the $20 billion that developed countries should provide to developing countries. [d’ici à 2025]but it is a drop in the ocean compared to what governments invest in these subsidies.says Farooq Ullah, from the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) think tank. There is no point in trying to be more ambitious in terms of nature-friendly financing without putting an end to the much larger harmful financial flows. »
“A large part of the negotiations are parasitized by the question of financing and the means of mobilizing private funds.also notes Arnaud Schwartz, vice president of France Nature Environnement, present at COP16 within the European delegation as a member of the European Economic and Social Committee. In reality, there is public money, but it is used for harmful actions. We pay once to destroy nature and once to repair it. Where is the common sense? »
The Kunming-Montreal agreement, adopted at the end of COP15 in 2022, states that the biodiversity financing gap amounts to about $700 billion a year. It foresees that States will identify, by 2025, all incentives and subsidies that are harmful to nature and then reduce them by about 500 billion dollars a year, by 2030.
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