The delegates dispatched to the conference failed to reach an agreement on what the environmental advocacy described as the main objectives: establishing standards for tracking the progress of biodiversity loss and financing the efforts of developing countries to stop biodiversity loss.
The global community was expected to agree on a set of rules designed to stop the biodiversity loss by the end of the decade. Instead the conference fizzled out in uncoordinated fashion on Saturday, with participants leaving the site after overnight negotiations hit an impenetrable gridlock over the issue of financing.
The failure to reach a comprehensive agreement on financing is alarming, according to WWF Finland.
“We western states have a duty to support developing countries because we are primarily responsible for the exacerbation of both biodiversity loss and the climate crisis. On a daily basis, we are consuming products that are produced elsewhere, and we are thereby outsourcing our detrimental environmental effects to other countries,” said Tarvainen.
WWF Finland also expressed its frustration with the Finnish government’s failure to finalise its biodiversity strategy by the conference, a commitment it made along with other countries at Cop-15 in Montreal, Canada, in 2022. Only 44 countries ultimately managed to unveil their strategies before or during Cop-16.
“We now expect an exhaustive strategy that addresses several open questions about, for example, the roles and responsibilities of different actors in halting biodiversity loss in Finland,” she emphasised.
Minister of Climate and the Environment Kai Mykkänen (NCP), who represented Finland at Cop-16, also voiced his disappointment with the failure to meet the main objectives set for the conference. Mykkänen pointed the finger at “large southern nations,” saying they were calling for a solution consisting of a “mishmash” of new funds that was unacceptable to other participants.
“We have to stick to that the biodiversity financing provided by industrialised countries has to come with strict performance criteria and administrative controls,” he stressed to YLE on Saturday.
He added that he is pleased with the agreement to obligate cosmetics, pharmaceutical and other companies utilising natural genetic material to contribute a share of their earnings – either 0.1 per cent of revenue or 1.0 per cent of operating profit – into a biodiversity fund.
“It’ll create a new stream of financing worth an estimated over a billion euros a year for improving the state of nature in naturally diverse countries,” Mykkänen said to Helsingin Sanomat on Saturday.
Another bit of good news was the agreement on the permanent representation of indigenous peoples in future UN Biodiversity Conferences.
Greenpeace, similarly, drew attention to the corporate funding obligation in its review of the conference, highlighting that pharmaceutical companies tried to lobby against the agreement until the very end.
Aleksi Teivainen – HT
