While the Trump administration in Washington has cut environmental programs, representatives in United Nations Biodiversity talks in Rome made moderate progress on Thursday in a series of measures to support nature.
Governments have gathered to deal with the global biodiversity damage that is unprecedented in human history, are driven by the ways people have transformed the world.
Seismic geopolitical changes in recent weeks have brought talks as the countries negotiated in a large meeting room, competing for small steps towards consensus. Representatives have carefully negotiated the language of the diplomatic texts, even when Britain announced reductions in its development aid abroad and as the United States continued to reduce international aid programs.
“We have sent a light of hope,” said Susana Muhamad, Minister of Environmental Environment in Colombia, who presided over the meeting. “The common good – the environment, the protection of life and the ability to meet for something greater than any national interest – is possible.”
Many developing countries are rich in biodiversity, but poor financially and three days of tense negotiations focusing on whether a new fund would be part of a plan to mobilize $ 200 billion annually for nature by 2030.
The countries of Africa and Latin America have asked a new fund, arguing that the way they today gain access to multilateral money is unfair and ineffective. But many donors have competed with their proposed fund, saying it would be expensive to create and manage, diverting money that could otherwise be spent on maintenance. Eventually, the representatives agreed in a process to decide whether to create a new fund. Still, it was a hard compromise and the room broke out with applause.
Representatives also approved a framework for monitoring the progress of nations in biodiversity commitments made in Montreal in 2022, which included an agreement to maintain 30 % of world land and water.
“We now have a roadmap to ensure the finances needed to prevent the biodiversity crisis and the means of monitoring and reviewing progress,” said Martin Harper, CEO of Birdlife International, a science and defense group. “These critical steps must now be supported with real money from the developed nations.”
Countries have recognized a biodiversity funding gap of $ 700 billion per year. In a milestone agreement in 2022, they agreed to mobilize at least $ 200 billion a year by 2030 from public and private sources and find an additional $ 500 billion per year by 2030 with the gradual abolition or nature -damaged subsidy. It is a huge amount of money to find in five years, even in the most favorable political climate.
The talks unfolded with a country apparently absent: the United States.
“I can’t remember the last time the US did not appear, but it has been a long time,” said David Ainsworth, a secretariat spokesman who manages the UN biodiversity Treaty, the basis of talks, the contract for biological diversity.
The United States has long been an embarrassing but nevertheless influential role in world negotiations on biodiversity. It is the only country in the world, with the exception of the Vatican, which has not validated the treaty. Still, the United States has had a very long influence on the sidelines of talks.
Now, all this has been called into question. In recent years, at least $ 385 million from US biodiversity funding have been channeled through the International Development Organization, which is dismantled by Trump’s administration. Other currents of US biodiversity funding are also at risk.
The White House did not answer questions about his plans to finance biodiversity or why he did not send representatives to the conversations.
Monica Medina, who served as an envoy to Biden’s biodiversity, called on American absence in Rome “a deafening silence” and said that cuts in biodiversity funding could lead to destructive disappearance.
“US funding was a very important part of the way we have kept part of the biodiversity we all love – elephants, whales, rhinoceros and polar bears – from disappearance,” Ms Medina said. “We may not be able to keep some of these amazing animals around our children and grandkids without any of this funding.”
The meeting in Rome was a repetition of talks last fall in Cali, Colombia, officially named the 16th Congress of the Parties in the Convention on Biological Diversity or COP16. Following a pioneering overtime agreement in a new way for companies to compensate countries for the use of genetic material, the talks lost the quorum and are suspended.
A promising result of Rome’s talks, according to interested parties, was a move to launch an international dialogue of the Ministers of Environment and Finance from developed and developing countries.
During the negotiations, some representatives made questionable words about nature.
“Biodiversity cannot wait for a bureaucratic process that lasts forever, while the environmental crisis continues to deteriorate,” a government spokesman from Bolivia said in concentrated nations on Wednesday. “Forests burn. Rivers are in agony and animals disappear.”