As the UN biodiversity negotiations in Montreal enter their final stages, government ministers arrive today to resolve tensions over just how much funding goes to developing countries.
At around 1am on Wednesday, more than 60 developing countries including India, Indonesia and all African countries left from the negotiations on finance. They claimed there is deficiencies in commitment from developed countries to fund efforts to safeguard nature.
“We're feeling that resource mobilization continues to be left out,” one delegate who left told CTV News. “It’s everyone’s problem, but we're not equally accountable for the drivers which have resulted in the destruction of biodiversity.”
Rising tensions have put talks “on the edge of the full breakdown,” WWF campaigner Innocent Maloba said. So ministers will need to rescue a last-minute agreement before the talks end on Monday.
During the high-level plenary, which marks the final area of the negotiations, hosts Canada said these were “ready to engage on discussions around the scale of funding” required to acquire a successful agreement.
“Many individuals make it clear that ambition must be based on a rise in funding, in addition to improvements within the predictability, transparency, comprehensiveness and accessibility of funding,” said the nation's environment minister, Steven Guilbeault.
China is co-hosting the talks, that have been originally said to be within the town of Kunming. Its government was less specific about the actions needed.
During the plenary, the nation's president Xi Jinping sent a relevant video message urging countries to “push forward the global process of biodiversity protection, turn ambitions into action” and “support developing countries in capacity building”.
Where may be the money?
Countries are negotiating an agenda to reverse nature destruction this decade. A 2023 study implies that immediate action is needed to halt mass extinctions, which threaten essential ecosystem services for humanity.
To achieve this, finance “is critical”, but negotiations around it have stalled plus they actually have more issues up for debate than other parts of the text, observers said.
“As in prior Cops for both climate and biodiversity, the hardest parts get left to the very end,” said Mark Opel, finance lead for the observer NGO Campaign for Nature.
The world must mobilize around $700 billion per year to turn back destruction of nature, a 2023 report by The Nature Conservancy, the Paulson Institute and the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability estimated.
The latest draft of Montreal's “nature pact” proposes $200 billion in direct funding and $500 billion by eliminating and redirecting subsidies that harm nature, for instance by promoting overfishing, monocultures or fossil fuel expansion.
Brazil and African countries have pushed to create a new fund for biodiversity separate from the Global Environmental Facility (GEF), the key UN financial mechanism for nature.
One Latin American negotiator told Climate Home many developing countries have faced difficulties accessing GEF funds.
Developed countries want to strengthen the GEF and mobilise non-government causes of funding rather than creating a new fund. “We need to unlock private and philanthropic support, development bank modernisation and subsidies realignment,” said Guilbeault.
Realigning subsidies plays an important role in getting new funds for biodiversity but negotiations for this topic also have proved difficult. The world spends approximately $1.1 trillion each year subsidising nature-harming activities.
Maloba said funds from civilized world would be crucial for any successful outcome in Montreal. “It is particularly concerning that donor countries don't look to be ready to step up on international biodiversity finance, despite some welcome commitments in the lead in,” Maloba said.
