COP16 in Rome: Financing nature’s future
- Date: 18 February 2025
Last fall, the United Nations convened a major bi-annual conference focused on protecting the world’s biodiversity – that’s the vast array of animals, plants, waters, and other natural systems that sustain our planet and our very existence. The conference, known formally as the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP16 for short, succeeded on some fronts. But it fell short in other areas, and left some critical work unfinished.
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In particular, the conference ended without an agreement about how the nations of the world will finance the work that needs to happen to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030. So next week, the conference will reconvene in Rome, Italy, to resume those negotiations and hopefully nail down a plan to raise the funds required for nature’s future. Today’s episode features a conversation with Andrew Deutz, WWF’s managing director for global policy and partnerships. Andrew is an expert on conservation finance and he’ll walk through the key issues facing negotiators as COP16 resumes.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Seth Larson: Welcome to Nature Breaking, a World Wildlife Fund podcast focused on the news and trends affecting our natural world, and the people and species who call it home. I'm Seth Larson. Listeners to this show will remember that last fall, the United Nations convened a major biannual conference focused on protecting the world's biodiversity.
That's the vast array of animals, plants, waters, and other natural systems that sustain our planet and our very existence. The conference, known formally as the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP16 for short. It succeeded on some fronts, but it fell short in other areas and left some critical work unfinished.
In particular, the conference ended without an agreement about how the nations of the world will finance the work that needs to happen to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030. So, next week the conference will reconvene in Rome, Italy to resume those negotiations and hopefully nail down a plan to raise the funds required to accomplish this important task.
Joining me today to talk about this is Andrew Deutz, WWF's Managing Director for Global Policy and Partnerships. Andrew is an expert on conservation finance, and he'll walk us through the key issues facing negotiators as COP 16 resumes. Now, one note for listeners, the United States never ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity after it was created in the 1990s. And therefore it does not participate in the negotiations as a party to the convention. So, for the purposes of this discussion, when you hear us talking about countries agreeing or disagreeing on things, please just know that we're referring to the other UN member states that ratified that convention.
If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to hit those like and subscribe buttons to help us out with the algorithm. And with that, here's my conversation with Andrew.
Okay, Andrew Deutz, welcome to Nature Breaking.
Andrew Deutz: Great to be here.
Seth Larson: So to set the table for this discussion, I think it's important to first just remind listeners that back in 2022, countries participating in the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity set a goal of halting and reversing nature loss by 2030 and that's an agreement that's known as the Global Biodiversity Framework and COP16 last fall in Colombia was the first meeting since then. And it was really supposed to serve as a sort of checkpoint for how countries were doing in trying to meet that goal and to talk about what more they might need to do. You attended that conference on behalf of WWF. How did it go?
Andrew Deutz: Well, like you said, this was meant to be sort of a check in, as opposed to a big process around setting new commitments. We did that in Montreal two years ago, so this was sort of the first chance to ask the question "so how are we doing?" and we're doing okay. And let me divide it up because in all of these big conferences, whether it's climate, biodiversity, what have you, there's sort of a split screen that you need to pay attention to.
There's what's happening in the formal negotiations where the negotiators are trying to agree on things among 196 countries. And then there's what's happening in the parallel space outside where most of the participants who fly into these cities are having conversations. And what happens there can be as important or more important, particularly in a year like this, where we're focused on implementation. So first within the negotiations, we made some really good progress on a couple of things. And got stuck on a couple of things. So we're right, that's the way these work, but where we made some good progress is around empowerment, implementation, and not on finance. But on empowerment, the biodiversity convention is probably the most sophisticated dialogue process between governments and Indigenous peoples about their role in conservation and sustainable development.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Andrew Deutz: And this year was critical because they adopted the parties in co-developed with the Indigenous peoples represented there a new work plan on what needs to happen to support Indigenous peoples role in conservation sustainable development worldwide. So that's a tick, you know, tick. Okay, we got a work plan now and broad agreement on it.
And also, they upgraded the status of the working group or established a full-on working group on indigenous issues. Now that sounds like a technical bureaucratic thing but the way these processes work, those technical bureaucratic things where you upgrade the status of the body is how you signal this is really important. So we now have a working group on implementation, a working group on science and a working group on Indigenous peoples. So again, that's.
Seth Larson: Kind of the difference between really having a seat at the table versus kind of just being in the room.
Andrew Deutz: Right. And what's interesting in this process is it, the extent of engagement with Indigenous Peoples, as you say, at the table, as opposed to us NGOs, we sort of sit in the back of the room and try and do our lobbying. So I take that as a recognition of sort of the empowerment of Indigenous Peoples in this process. Made some really good progress there. On implementation, the big question on the table was how many countries have now come up with national strategies of how they're going to achieve the set of targets that we agreed in Montreal two years ago and so the answer is now 123 countries out of 196 have submitted new nature targets incorporated into their national law or their national policies, what they're going to do. And 46 of them have now developed action plans on how they're going to achieve those goals by 20, by so 46 out of 96, 196 is not great, but 123 countries taking the seriously establishing national targets that's progress. There's more to be done. Where the formal negotiations got hung up was on the finance issues.
So they were supposed to adopt a new resource mobilization strategy, which is not all that contentious because most of it was already agreed in Montreal.
Seth Larson: Can you just define resource mobilization? Because I, that, I think that's kind of just jargon…
Andrew Deutz: Sorry. That's the jargon for, for, where's the money going to come from.
Seth Larson: Thank you.
Andrew Deutz: So where they got hung up is the question of whether or not to create yet another new biodiversity fund. So they created a new fund for biodiversity in Montreal called the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund. One of the big wins coming out of Cali is they finally agreed on a mechanism to deal with, and this is going to get complicated, digital sequence information.
Give me a minute to explain that. Several years ago, the Biodiversity Convention adopted a treaty on, it was called Access and Benefit Sharing. But basically, it was the question of, let's say, the stereotypical framework is, some pharmaceutical company in the U. S. or U. K. or Norway or Denmark. Denmark's the big ones, goes to Brazil and finds some plant species that has a particular chemical compound in it, brings it back to their labs in Denmark and synthesizes a cure for cancer markets that and makes a gazillion dollars. The question is how much of that revenue should go back to the country in the Amazon that has protected and stewarded that species from time immemorial? And, and so we have a, basically a protocol, sort of a sub subsidiary treaty that sets out the rules on, how those specimens can be collected, how they're commercialized, and how you share the revenue. The technology now has moved on significantly so that you no longer need the physical compound, but there are these massive databases in the world that contain the digital sequencing of those compounds. You think about like, it's now possible, you can come up with the genetic code, and then if you want to develop a new product, you use a computer algorithm to test literally millions of different genetic sequences to see which ones are likely to yield the particular expression in a protein or a gene that you want. This is how the COVID vaccine was developed, for example. So now the question is, if we're no longer regulating physical compounds to share the benefits, if there's commercialization, we needed a new agreement to figure out how do you share the benefits from the use of these genetic sequences that exist in databases outside of the countries that, where they, where the products originated.
Seth Larson: Right. Because these sequences were just being sort found and then, and published and then they're just sort of out there for…
Andrew Deutz: But then they just sit there in a big database, right?
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Andrew Deutz: So they, it's been like 8 or 10 years that they've been trying to figure out how do we adapt the existing regime and rules to this new technology? And they finally did agree on that. Where it got really complicated is oftentimes, like the biggest database is from the, is in the United Kingdom, or the biggest number of samples of genetic material is in the UK because 19th century and early 20th century British scientists went out, explored the world and brought stuff back.
Much of it, they don't even know where it came from. So you couldn't set up a system that says you have to pay the country where it came from. So the compromise was let's just create a new fund and all the revenue that we agree that comes out of this mechanism will go into something that's now called the Cali Fund because the meeting was in Cali, Columbia, 50 percent of any funding that goes into that pot of money will go directly to Indigenous peoples. Has the potential to be pretty significant. The other 50 percent will be used to support countries to implement their commitments under the global biodiversity framework. So we came up with a new innovative financing mechanism called the Cali fund. So that was a win on the finance side. And then where the negotiators got stuck, lastly was the question of, should we create a yet another new fund or what's the evolution of the existing biodiversity funds by 2030? And they literally ran out the clock on that. So the meeting in Cali shut down at like eight o'clock in the morning the day after it was supposed to end because they ran out of quorum like people just literally left and got on their planes and flew home. So they had to suspend the meeting. We'll reconvene in Rome in a few weeks to solve that question around what's the future of the funds or set of funds that we have for biodiversity.
And then the other thing that got hung up in that is the work on a new plan on indicators, which is really unsexy, but really important because the old expression, you can manage what you can measure. So the idea is to agree on what are the scientific indicators that we need to track progress across all of the biodiversity targets that we've set. So we can actually measure how we're doing and adjust along the way.
The other thing that was really important that happened is that it was in the parallel spaces outside of the formal negotiations. And there again, look at empowerment, finance, and implementation. There was again, a lot of dialogue around how do we support Indigenous communities and their voices were really strong. So that was an important element. Second, there was a lot going on in the space of financial innovation to support biodiversity. Seeing a bunch of new financial mechanisms. WWF helped develop the concept of debt swaps like two decades ago. There have been some recent innovations, and we now launched a coalition of partners to scale up the next generation of debt swaps to provide both debt relief and new conservation funding in developing countries in partnership with multilateral development banks. Really important. There were a number of meetings around the PFPs, a Project Finance for Permanence that WWF and our partners at Pew and Nature Conservancy are working on. So we made some real progress in moving along a new one of these in Brazil, celebrating a recent success in Colombia. With our friends at the Nature Conservancy have just done one in Mongolia. So this is an idea to bring together multiple streams of finance, both public sector, private sector, and philanthropic into a pot of money with a set of commitments on domestic resource mobilization in those countries to fully fund over time, 30 by 30 target. In other words, how we're going to build out the protected areas network that countries have agreed to do. Here's the financing vehicle and so now we're seeing like real tangible resources flowing to places that matter. And then the third one that was really important was a good meeting on this Brazilian proposal to launch something called the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, which could be in theory, the world's largest conservation trust fund to reward countries for maintaining standing forests that Brazil is hoping to launch at the Climate COP30 in November of this year.
And we saw a bunch of ministers from both developed and developing countries coming together, committing to try and make this thing work. So the point is we saw a lot of really good progress on implementation, on financing, on empowerment in the parallel spaces, which can be just as important and much less rancorous than what's going on in the negotiations.
Seth Larson: Yeah. And so I think one, one piece I want to get into to, to give a little bit more context and insight here, as we're talking about, so, okay, there's the formal negotiations got hung up on this question of finance. But there was some good progress on the sidelines and less formal settings about, moving forward, different financial mechanisms.
I think a question for our listeners that might be helpful in illuminating this topic a little more is how much money are we trying to raise here? And how much money do we need to actually do all this work? I asked that question because you're one of the best experts to weigh in on it. A key metric that the world uses on this front, it comes from a report that you put together for the Paulson Institute a few years ago, it estimated that a global gap of about $700 billion dollars per year exists between what's available and what's actually needed to finance the conservation of nature. That figure is formally incorporated into the global biodiversity framework. And it's, it's kind of the key number that countries are trying to work towards, at least in the formal side of the negotiations. So I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit more about that estimate and what it means and how it really breaks down.
Andrew Deutz: So actually we came up with that back in 2020 in the lead up to Montreal to try and put some numbers on how much money is the world currently generating for biodiversity? How much money does the world need to generate? What's the gap? And then most importantly, how do we fill the gap? And those numbers provided sort of the framework for the target, the financial targets in the global biodiversity framework. So that first number of, you know, how much money does the world need? And it's somewhere between $750 and $950 billion, which sounds like a lot, but remember that we're in a world where global GDP is over a hundred trillion dollars a year. So, so in the larger scheme of things, it's not a lot of money. Where relative to where we are, the world right now spends somewhere between $120 and $140 billion. So we need like a fivefold increase. The good news is the money is out there. So first, how did we calculate how much the world needs? And we looked at, there's some good studies out there on the needs to turn key sectors sustainable, right?
So there are numbers out there for forestry and for fisheries. We had some colleagues funded by the campaign for nature who did an analysis of what's it going to cost to achieve the 30 by 30 target for protected areas. So we just took their, their numbers and research. And then we looked at some of the other critical areas. What's it going to take to maintain coastal ecosystems. What's it going to take to deal with invasive species issues? How are we going to deal with greening or restoring urban environments? And then the biggest piece of this, to be honest, is in the agriculture sector, and there were not good numbers here.
So research colleagues at Cornell built a global model to try and figure out what is it going to take to make first cropland and then grazing land fully sustainable by 2030? And then what's the annual amount of funding you need to get here between now and 2030? The agriculture sector is the largest source of threat or degradation of biodiversity worldwide in the immediate term right now, right?
So this becomes a story of how do we shift agriculture from being a net negative to a net positive in terms of biodiversity and frankly carbon as well. The good news is when you look at the numbers, we know that there's like $500 billion a year in harmful subsidies that go into the agriculture sector.
So the question is, the biggest source of new financing would be how do you shift that from being negative to neutral, or from negative to neutral to positive, and turn it into a positive flow for biodiversity? Some of the other really important mechanisms, like I should say, the biggest source of finance for biodiversity is just government's own budget.
Seth Larson: So if you think here in the United States, think about the budget of the National Park Service, or, the conservation title of the Farm Bill that provides funding for grasslands conservation, or any work that's going on around, you know, restoration of the Everglades, for example, so, you know, got money that government spend domestically is the biggest source. Then there's a lot of money that's being spent through the notion of natural infrastructure where you're restoring wetlands, for instance, to deal with flood management and control. There's been sort of a revolution in hydrological engineering over the last decade, where people have understood that we need to engineer solutions with nature, not against nature. Yeah. Okay. So just to reiterate that this question of subsidies and adjusting subsidies around the world to, to better align with, keeping nature intact and to stop incentivizing bad practices that, that accounts for the biggest portion, right? I think, did you say it was about $500 billion, per year that, falls in that bucket?
Seems like a ripe area to start in and you just listed a lot of areas that we can target. How about the other $200 billion of this $700 billion estimate? Where's, where's that money, coming from and, and what are those sources look like?
Andrew Deutz: Well, we looked at of the existing sources, which ones are the most scalable. And to be honest, this really comes down to a story about agriculture and infrastructure. So if you leave the agricultural subsidies aside, a lot of the big wins are going to be in infrastructure. So one major source of funding would be expanding the use of biodiversity offsets. And if you think about it, the world made a huge commitment in Paris 10 years ago to basically decarbonize the electricity sector. In order to do that, we need to build a huge amount of new renewable energy infrastructure and new transmission lines to basically, to upgrade the grid. In the United States, that renewable energy build out is actually the largest single threat to intact habitat. So, how are we going to, we need to build that infrastructure, but in doing so, how do we do it in a way that's biodiversity friendly? And so there's a lot of spatial planning that needs to happen to minimize the impact.
There will be some residual impacts. Those should be compensated for as part of the design to help support nature. The same in much of the future. Developing world, they haven't built their highway and railroad systems and all the rest. So there's going to be a lot of linear infrastructure being built in those places that will also have impact.
So again, that should be a source of revenue to help compensate the unavoidable impacts on biodiversity.
Second, we think there's still opportunity to scale up domestic budgets. And I think there's a lot of expansion possible in what we call natural infrastructure. So as I said, you can think about If you're trying to control floods, and as climate change happen, and we get more intense storms, there's a greater need to deal with flooding issues. In many cases along rivers, we've channelized them and we've disconnected them from historic floodplains. If we can reconnect them to floodplains, let them do what they do naturally, which is absorb water and regulate the flows. We've seen a lot of work in restoration in upper watersheds, that can help control and slow down runoff, or even a lot of work that's happening in the greening of cities. That allows that you remove impermeable areas, even just put immediate, you know, grass medians in parking lots and what have you that can absorb more water when it rains and slow down the runoff to control and moderate the immediate runoff when you have a major storm event. So there's a lot we can do to sort of green infrastructure, which would be good for biodiversity and have these sort of infrastructure service benefits.
Seth Larson: Yeah. So, those are great applications for how funding could be spent. Where would those dollars come from? Would these be national budgets that are committed and that counts toward closing this global nature funding gap? Or is there a vision for some of this funding coming from private sector sources or or where, what are all the threads we're trying to pull?
Andrew Deutz: Right. So in both cases, so at the end of the day, we think there's a limited ability to increase the amount of government money going into the sector. Like there's a, you know, a growth rate there, but it's not going to be a step change. The step change comes, I think, in private sector finance if available. So if, you know, if it's private sector, that's financing or government's financing the infrastructure that you would otherwise do, but we can do it better and green it, then that's a source of finance from the infrastructure sector. There's also a fair amount of opportunity think in greening, getting companies to green their supply chain. So we've seen companies making commitments to get deforestation out of their supply chains so that if you buy a leather jacket or if you buy oil palm, you know, if you buy a product that's got oil palm in it, making sure that there is not deforestation back at the source, the major sources of deforestation coming from timber, cattle, soy and oil palm.
And so can we change the practices in those places that reduce the amount of deforestation because consumers are demanding that downstream or investors are demanding that from the companies? Companies have made those commitments. That means making investments in their supply chain that ultimately going to affect agricultural practices. So again, it's all kind of connected back to agriculture and infrastructure.
Seth Larson: Yeah. Okay. So and this is basically the mission that lays at the feet of negotiators who are going to be reconvening in Rome next week, right? Or we're recording this on February 7th, we'll be releasing this episode, I think on February 18th. So I think by the time this airs, it'll be about a week or so before the conference kicks off.
So knowing that this is their mission, to put a plan together for raising these funds or for, getting commitments to adjust subsidies to make up that gap. I, you mentioned before the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund. I, I know that's one of the sticking points that remains right? I may, basically, my question was gonna be, what was the hangup in, in Cali, Colombia in last fall that caused the negotiations to end without any final agreement and what, what are the hurdles that are left for negotiators to kind of overcome going into Rome?
Andrew Deutz: Sure. So the biggest issue on the table that where things deadlocked and they ran out the clock in Cali around the question of do we need another new fund for biodiversity?
And if so, when? Right now, the largest multilateral fund for biodiversity is the Global Environment Facility, which was established in 1991 at the time of the Rio Earth Summit, when the climate and biodiversity conventions were adopted, and it serves as the financial mechanism for both.
Then the Paris Agreement set up the Green Climate, actually it was a little before that, but the Climate Convention has adopted the Green Climate Fund, which is a dedicated multilateral fund separate from the Global Environment Facility just for climate change and it actually has far more money than the GEF. And so a number of the biodiversity negotiators are saying like, "Hey, we need our own dedicated biodiversity fund." So the compromise in Montreal was all right, we'll set up a new fund called the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund. It's got a couple hundred million dollars at this point. It is managed within the same institutional architecture as the GEF itself. So we trust it's essentially a trust fund at the World Bank that donors can put money into. It's set to expire in 2030 by the mandate, that's part of the compromise.
So the question on the table is, do we want to evolve that into something new and different that looks more like the Green Climate Fund, i.e. a separate biodiversity-only fund in addition to the GEF? And what else do we need to see in this system of funds? So there's always this tension of, we want more funds, we want easier access, and we want more money in them coming from the developing countries that's balanced by the concerns of the donor countries saying we have to have accountability because this is public money. So we want to make sure the money is well spent and can be tracked. And we want to ensure the efficiency of the funds, and constantly setting up new funds means more institutional bureaucracy to manage each one. It actually makes it harder for developing countries because instead of having one project proposal format, you've got 10. And so there's this debate going on in the system of how do we get more money to flow? How do we make it easier to access and how do we optimize the efficiency while also recognizing that for budgetary purposes and bureaucratic purposes, it's sometimes easier to access money that is specifically labeled for biodiversity compared to something that is multifaceted?
So these are the issues that are on the table and aren't easy to work out. What we're hoping for in Rome, quite honestly, is just the compromise that says we need more time to work this out.
So we have the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund. It has a couple hundred million dollars in it. It is meant to end by 2030. So there'll be some change in this network of global funds on biodiversity and climate by 2030. Let's spend the time between now and then analyzing what's working well, what changes can be made to the existing funds. And what new or additional do we need? Lastly, one of the questions, one of the innovations of the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund is it allows funding from multiple sources.
So the Global Environment Facility, the Green Climate Fund, those are capitalized by donor countries through their foreign aid agencies, putting money into the fund. The Global Biodiversity Framework Fund can also accept money from philanthropic sources or from private sector sources or from new innovative financing systems like we see with the Cali fund on digital sequence information.
So there's a notion of like, can we come up with something new and innovative that will allow us to attract more money from more sources? And can we streamline the system? These are complicated questions.
So it's, so what we're hoping for in Rome is, let's take a deep breath and give ourselves a few years to figure this out and figure out what's the best outcome that gets more money to countries to implement their commitments under the Global Biodiversity Framework.
Seth Larson: Yeah and I'll just note for the sake of transparency, WWF-US is a, is a GEF Agency, and, and, so we're basically an implementation partner for some of that work, among many others. But ultimately these decisions are going to be made by the negotiators who are representing countries that are part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and we'll see what they come up with and hopefully, like you said, there's a path forward and not just further gridlock, when, when folks meet next week.
As we close out this discussion, I wanted to just zoom out a little bit. We've been talking about the technical aspects of these negotiations that are set to happen in Rome. I really enjoy hearing, the expertise that you bring that to this and your granular understanding of all these different negotiation points and how this, these financing questions come to be. This may feel a little abstract for some listeners and I wanted to ask if you can just speak to why all this matters so much.
How do people and the planet stand to benefit if the negotiations at COP16 in Rome are successful?
Andrew Deutz: Well, I'll say it's, it's much broader than what happens at COP16, right? The question of a biodiversity fund and a set of indicators for biodiversity are important elements in helping implement the Global Biodiversity Framework, but what matters is that the framework gets implemented. Why? Well, because nature underpins pretty much everything in our lives.
Food, water, clean air, human health, livelihoods, like over half of the global economy is dependent on the goods and services that come from nature. But if you think about it like oxygen and water, you don't live too long without them. So at a certain point, it's not about the economy, it's about human health and well-being. And we saw with the Living Planet Report that WWF put out a few months ago, that something like 73 percent of the populations of wild species are in decline.
Seth Larson: Yeah.
Andrew Deutz: If you look at the climate models, we're coming close to some really serious tipping points. Like one of the most worrying ones is, could happen. In terms of the temperature regime in the next few decades, if we don't get it right, where the Amazon basically changes primarily from being rain forest to being Savannah, that would be hugely disruptive to the hydrological cycle in Latin America. But what that really means is Brazil and Argentina are going to get less rainfall, and they're going to go from being one of the major breadbaskets of the world to significantly decreased agricultural productivity, which
would have a huge impact on global food security on national economies and on local people's livelihoods.
So is what we, you know, save the rainforest for its own sake, but also save the rain. If we don't save the Amazon overall, it could have significantly disruptive impacts for people and for the economy. So we need to figure out how we're going to save all this stuff.
Seth Larson: Yeah. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for taking some time to talk us through this today. You'll be heading to Rome next week, right? Great. Well, best of luck. I know you'll be there with a lot of our WWF colleagues advocating on the sidelines for a good outcome. I wish you the best of luck and we'll be watching this closely.
Thanks again to Andrew for joining the show today. As I've said before, it was disappointing last year that the three major UN conferences on biodiversity, climate, and plastic pollution all fell short of their goals, but negotiators now have a second chance to get a positive outcome for biodiversity in Rome. And later this year, negotiators will resume efforts to nail down a treaty for plastic pollution. Here's hoping that the outcome in Rome builds momentum for more progress to come, because at the end of the day, we all rely on clean air and clean water, and we need these global frameworks to help ensure that those resources remain available for future generations.
For now, thank you for listening, and together, let's keep building that more sustainable future.