The 2022 Kunming‑Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework set out a series of targets intended to halt the loss of nature worldwide. Eleven days of negotiations at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP16) in Cali, Colombia, from 21 October to 1 November 2024, served as the first major test of whether those targets can be achieved.
Delegates gathered in Cali to assess the framework’s monitoring mechanism, which obliges each country to measure its progress toward the agreed conservation goals. At the same time, the talks were meant to produce a concrete roadmap for the financial assistance that the framework promises to developing nations.
Developing countries, which contain a large share of the planet’s remaining biodiversity, entered the conference expecting a clear plan for the flow of promised funds. They face the dual challenge of protecting ecosystems while pursuing economic development, and the framework acknowledges that without financial support, many of their conservation targets remain out of reach.
Negotiations, however, fractured rather than collapsed. The split revealed deep‑seated tension between industrialised nations, which hold the bulk of the funding, and those still striving to industrialise, which hold the biodiversity assets. While the discussion did not dissolve entirely, it failed to deliver the definitive funding commitments that many participants had hoped for.
The choice of Cali as the host city was symbolic. Colombia ranks among the world’s most biodiverse countries, with rainforests, mountain ranges, coastal habitats and endemic species. Yet it also grapples with poverty and pressure to convert land for agriculture, mining and oil extraction. Holding the talks in a setting where the conflict between development and conservation is lived daily underscored the difficulty of the negotiations.
Despite the ambitious language of the Kunming‑Montreal Framework, the conference highlighted a crucial shortfall: ambition without a financing mechanism remains merely aspirational. The monitoring system is in place, and the conservation targets remain documented, but the financial “machinery” needed to implement them is still only a sketch.
The partial breakdown of the funding talks leaves the framework intact but precarious. Without a reliable flow of resources, developing nations will continue to face the stark choice between protecting nature and meeting the immediate needs of their populations. The conference did not resolve this dilemma; it brought it into sharper focus.
Looking ahead, the next biodiversity conference will need to address the unfinished business of resource transfer, priority setting and accountability for the promises made in 2022. The urgency of the biodiversity crisis does not pause for diplomatic deliberations—species continue to disappear while negotiations unfold.
COP16 therefore serves as a warning that goodwill alone cannot bridge the gap between wealthy donor countries and biodiversity‑rich, financially constrained nations. The path to meeting the Kunming‑Montreal targets remains uncertain, and the world must move quickly to turn the framework’s goals into actionable, funded outcomes.
