Before the start of talks this Monday, October 21, between delegates from some 200 countries present in Colombia, an opening ceremony with official speeches inaugurates the 16th UN conference on biodiversity on Sunday in Cali (southwest).
UN Secretary General Antonio Gutteres should once again sound the alarm about the urgency of preserving lands, oceans and living species, essential for humanity.
“Vital connection with nature”
The leftist president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, intends to take advantage of this opportunity for Colombia, one of the richest countries in biodiversity, to take the lead in the global mobilization for nature.
And its Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, who chairs the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), hopes the debates will lead to concrete solutions when they conclude on November 1.
“There has been much debate globally about the impact of climate change and the urgency to decarbonise. But there has never been the same focus on the need to protect nature, to recognize our vital connection with nature, to see it as our ally. because we are an integral part of nature,” he declared this weekend before the debates.
COP16 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 implementation of this Kunming-Montreal agreement with ambitious goals for 2030 is not progressing quickly enough.
Countries had committed to present before COP16 a “national biodiversity strategy” that would reflect their part in the efforts to meet the 23 global goals set: protect 30% of lands and seas, restore 30% of degraded ecosystems, halve pesticides and the rate of introduction of invasive alien species, or mobilize 200 billion dollars a year for nature.
“A popular COP”
But the details of these mechanisms, crucial to holding countries accountable, have yet to be adopted. In Cali it will be about demonstrating that promises will be fulfilled. And to give new ambitions to the great climate COP that will open in three weeks in Azerbaijan.
The European Union, an important partner in the organization of the COP16 on biodiversity, hopes that this forum will be the moment to “put words into action”, according to its ambassador in the country.
“We share Colombia’s ambition to make this international meeting a popular COP, a COP for the population,” ambassador Gilles Bertrand told AFP on Sunday.
“The EU and its member countries are convinced that the conservation of nature and biodiversity is done with people,” said Gilles Bertrand.
A summit on biodiversity under the threat of guerrilla war
Another challenge, security, also looms over this Colombian COP. Cali is put on alert due to the threat of a guerrilla war. The largest dissident faction of the defunct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc) guerrilla, which rejects the historic peace agreement signed in 2016, is in open war with the government. He recommended that “delegates from the national and international community refrain from attending” COP16, promising that it would be a “fiasco.”
The 12,000 participants, including 140 ministers and seven heads of state, are under the protection of some 11,000 Colombian police and soldiers, supported by security personnel from the UN and the United States.
Gustavo Petro assured that security would be “guaranteed”, although this weekend he admitted to being a little “nervous.”
Numerous police officers were visible on Sunday at the airport and in the center of Cali, near the delegations’ hotels, the green zone next to a river where numerous public events will take place and the so-called blue zone where the debates will take place, patrolled by the police where delegates and journalists are strictly searched at the entrance.
Colombia, the country of many indigenous peoples, intends to let them participate largely in the debates.
“We have spent a lot of time dividing ourselves and we have forgotten that Mother Earth asks us for help. I hope that the agreements that are reached are guided by nature and not by economics. Because, why be rich if not? I have nowhere to live” said Carlos Ignacio, representative of the AKTenamit association of Guatemala.
Source: BFM TV
