UN chief calls for investment to save nature

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for “significant investments” to safeguard nature on Sunday during the COP16 protocol ceremony on biodiversity in Cali, where the Colombian president lambasted “fossil fuels of the dead”.

In a video message on the eve of the opening of negotiations, Antonio Guterres called on negotiators to “leave Cali (on November 1) with significant investments in the Global Biodiversity Framework funds, and commitments to mobilize other sources of public and private funding to implement it in its entirety.

“It is about honoring the promises made in terms of financing and accelerating support to developing countries,” he stressed, because “the collapse of services provided by nature, such as pollination and drinking water, would cause an annual loss of trillions of dollars for the global economy, with the poorest being the hardest hit,” he recalled.

The 16th UN conference on biodiversity in Cali is the first meeting of the international community since the adoption in 2022, during COP15, of an unprecedented roadmap to safeguard nature. But the application of this “Kunming-Montreal” agreement with ambitious objectives for 2030 is not moving fast enough.

The 196 countries (excluding the United States) had committed to presenting by COP16 a “national biodiversity strategy” reflecting their part of the efforts to meet the 23 global objectives set: protect 30% of lands and seas, restore 30 % of degraded ecosystems, halve pesticides and the rate of introduction of invasive exotic species, or mobilize 200 billion dollars per year for nature.

But the details of these mechanisms, crucial for holding countries accountable, remain to be adopted. In Cali, the aim will be to demonstrate that promises will be kept, thus setting the tone before the big COP on the climate, COP29, which opens in three weeks in Azerbaijan.

“This is the time for all of us to move from words to action, with adequate financing mechanisms and clear, effective and measurable national objectives and policies,” the Ambassador of the Republic of Congo summed up to AFP on Sunday. European Union in Colombia, Gilles Bertrand.

“We are not on the right track,” insisted the UN chief, recalling that “the destruction of nature fuels conflict, hunger and disease, fuels poverty, inequality and the climate crisis, and harms sustainable development, green jobs, cultural heritage and GDP.”

In a diatribe against “fossil fuels of death”, Colombian President Gustavo Petro castigated “the CO₂ that the mega-rich reject, making countries whose forests absorb it pay a risk premium”. “This is a real moral and deadly contradiction, it is the richest predators who must be taxed to remove carbon from production and consumption,” he said, calling for the development of clean energy.

Its Minister of the Environment, Susana Muhamad, president of this COP16 whose slogan is “Peace with nature”, explained that this peace “implies a conceptual change of values”. “Nature is not a resource. Nature is the fiber of life that also makes us possible.

According to her, this COP16 is “not only a matter of implementing regulatory mechanisms” but “essentially of rethinking our way of life, of rethinking the development model, of recomposing, of rediscovering how we live together in diversity , in a system that does not make nature a victim of development.