UN biodiversity summit opens in Colombia with urgent calls for action, finance

The world's biggest nature protection conference opened in Colombia on Monday with its president calling for urgent action and financing to reverse humankind's rapacious destruction of biodiversity.

"The planet doesn't have time to lose," Colombian Environment Minister and COP16 president Susana Muhamad told delegates from nearly 200 countries as she opened the Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

"We all agree that we are underfunded for this mission, we all agree that we need further sources of funding," said Muhamad, as she urged parties to use the event to take stock and make further commitments.

"We now, all together, must deliver... Cali 2024 could be a light in this very dark world."

About 12,000 delegates, including 140 government ministers and a dozen heads of state were expected at the largest-ever biodiversity COP running until November 1.

Themed "Peace with Nature," it has the urgent task of coming up with monitoring and funding mechanisms to ensure 23 UN targets agreed at COP15 two years ago can be met by 2030 to "halt and reverse" the loss of nature.

 'Peace with Nature'  

On Sunday, UN chief Antonio Guterres urged countries to "convert words into action" and fatten the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF) created last year to achieve the targets.

So far, countries have made about $250 million in commitments to the fund, according to monitoring agencies.

It is part of a broader agreement reached two years ago under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) to mobilize at least $200 billion per year by 2030 for biodiversity, including $20 billion per year by 2025 from rich nations to help developing ones.

A collapse in services provided by nature, such as pollination and clean water, could see the global economy lose "trillions of dollars a year," said Guterres.

The summit opened under the protection of more than 10,000 Colombian police and soldiers after the EMC guerrilla group at war with the government told foreign delegations to stay away and warned the conference "will fail."

Cali is the nearest large city to territory controlled by the EMC, which has been engaged in fraught peace negotiations with the government.

Under strict security at the venue, the delegates have their work cut out for them. There are just five years left to achieve the target of placing 30 percent of land and sea areas under protection by 2030.

World-renowned British primate expert Jane Goodall warned ahead of the summit there was little time to reverse the downward slide.

"The time for words and false promises is past if we want to save the planet," Goodall told AFP last week.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which keeps a red list of threatened animals and plants, more than a quarter of assessed species -- about a million altogether -- are threatened with extinction.

Host Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, and Gustavo Petro, its first leftist president in modern history, has made environmental protection a priority.

But the country has struggled to extricate itself from six decades of armed conflict involving leftist guerrillas such as the EMC, right-wing paramilitaries, drug gangs, and the state.