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By Katherine Unger Baillie

Last fall, members of the University of Pennsylvania community attended the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16), held in Cali, Colombia. The gathering, otherwise known as the United Nations Biodiversity Conference, encompassed a series of meetings, discussions, public events, and policymaking sessions. With support from the Environmental Innovations Initiative (EII) and Penn Global, Penn obtained observer status for this COP for the first time, enabling University experts to represent in an official capacity.

In January, EII organized a discussion session to review the attendees’ impressions and takeaways from the COP, as well as to solicit their ideas for how Penn can continue contributing to global policymaking related to biodiversity. Amanda Lloyd, global programs manager for Penn’s Institute for Urban Research (Penn IUR), Fernanda Jiménez, visiting scholar with the Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies (CLALS), and Carolina Angel Botero, a postdoctoral fellow with CLALS, all took part in the COP16 in Cali and joined in the discussion; their insights follow.

Financing biodiversity: A central question

Just as finance was a focus of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties, (COP29), also held last fall, the question of how to generate funds to pay for the important work of biodiversity protection was a major emphasis of the proceedings in Cali.

“Penn IUR and UNEP have been working through the Generation Restoration project, which is focused on urban nature-based solutions (NBS),” Lloyd said. “We’ve expanded up to 25 cities, around 10 of which are models of NBS. Our focus is on financing NBS in urban environments, and over the last two years we’ve built a framework to help cities track NBS investments across their entire portfolio.”

These efforts are intended to understand the root cause, Lloyd said, of why cities aren’t investing and to develop benchmarks and standards for NBS. Such criteria and data-grounded metrics are especially important for smaller cities that may currently lack sufficient resources and capacity to enact NBS, which are often more expensive than other alternatives.

In Cali, after a day of meetings focused on nature in cities, Penn IUR and UNEP jointly released a report on the need for better data to support financing of NBS in cities. Several cities were in attendance, highlighting, for example, how model NBS cities like Seattle approach their efforts. 

It was the largest Biodiversity COP to date, with about 23,000 in attendance, and financial and business attendee numbers are going up. “The head of the urban group at the World Bank was there and noting the good progress,” Lloyd said. 

Integrating climate and nature negotiations (and funding)

All the Penn delegates to COP16 noted a growing awareness of the need to connect global biodiversity and climate negotiations, with finance as one common thread. “The narrative was, from Cali to Belém,” Jiménez said, Belém being the Brazilian host city for the climate COP planned for fall of 2025. The COP16 delegation from Colombia is already working closely with their Brazilian counterparts to provide a bridge between the two events, and recently put out a call for ideas “to increase cooperation and policy coherence” to connect the two processes.

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Bringing these two discussions closer could improve efficiency by directing funding to initiatives that achieve both biodiversity and climate aims. According to the World Bank, roughly 37% of climate mitigation goals related to the Paris Agreement can be accomplished by NBS, yet, Lloyd noted, there is an awareness among climate policy experts that their knowledge of the “nature piece is not where it should be.”

Another challenges is that NBS approaches have historically not been profitable, and thus often fail to attract private-sector investment, which has more often gone to the energy or water sectors. There are possible profitable “nature sector” projects, Lloyd noted, such as those related to benchmarking or nature for debt swaps. These can bring success but may “feel esoteric,” she said.

Who “owns” genetic resources?

The primary focus of the Cali events was on implementation of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, established at COP15, which sets out biodiversity target to achieve by 2030, “to reach the global vision of a world living in harmony with nature by 2050.”

But the Cali gathering also included the meeting of the Parties to the Nagoya Protocol on Access to Genetic Resources and the Fair and Equitable Sharing of Benefits Arising from their Utilization. It was on this topic that the COP advanced meaningful progress, Jiménez said. 

The Parties accepted a Digital Sequence Information (DSI) framework that establishes a global fund for biodiversity conservation that will collect payments from companies that use genetic material or associated digital information from species other than humans. A big caveat is that the fund is voluntary. “The resolution is interesting,” said Jiménez. “It states which sectors of industry should be contributing,” including pharmaceutical, agribusiness, and biotechnology companies. It also ensures that smaller companies will be shielded from contributions by setting up a threshold of revenue under which companies wouldn’t be expected to contribute, roughly $20 million in sales. Notably, academics are not included in the obligation to contribute to the fund.

Also stipulated by the framework is that at least half of the funds raised should to go Indigenous communities to support proposed biodiversity-related projects. “It was a big win for Indigenous communities,” Jiménez noted. “It’s the first body in any framework on environmental issues that is set up explicitly for Indigenous and local communities.”

Yet while Indigenous communities marked a win with the Nagoya Protocol outcomes, Angel Botero, an anthropologist, is keeping an eye on the participation of both Indigenous and Black communities in the Biodiversity COP going forward. “There was a big celebration for including the wording about people of African descent alongside other local communities in Article 8J, ensuring their contributions and traditional knowledge in strengthening their role in the implementation of the Convention," she said. "It is meant to enhance the participation of all minority groups."

The topic of fund distribution will remain a key point of discussion in ongoing negotiations throughout the year. Specifically, this concerns the allocation of resources from the newly established Cali Fund. Half of the funds collected will be directed to Indigenous peoples, people of African descent, and local communities to support capacity building and technology transfer. The methods for implementing this will be addressed in the coming years. Angel Botero, who is interested in bridging law, science, and anthropology, had an ear tuned to how “nature gets written” in the COP16 negotiations, and specifically how the language and grammar—which vary across nations and cultures—can influence the process and outcomes of biodiversity protection. "Incorporating nature into legal rights goes beyond just ecological goals," she explains. It involves maintaining a balance between the proper functioning of ecosystems and the needs of the inhabitants in the areas considered. This nuance is what should be captured by legal grammar. "An approach that fully acknowledges the evolving nature of these places is essential," she concludes.

Oceans in focus

Another policy area in which the Cali meeting saw advancement was on marine biodiversity protection. During a day dedicated to oceans, a major topic of discussion was the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) agreement, also known as the High Seas Treaty. Adopted by the United Nations in 2023, BBNJ lays out a pathway for marine biodiversity protection in the two-thirds of the ocean that falls outside of country’s jurisdiction. In Cali, nations adopted a framework to establish Ecologically or Biologically Significant Areas (EBSAs), a designation that can meaningfully inform conservation measures. “Parties have been discussing this resolution for eight years and it finally got concluded,” Jiménez said. This doesn’t mean highly significant marine areas will automatically be protected, but provides a process to work within the BBNJ agreement to propose areas for eventual protection.

COP-Cali connections 

For the full two weeks of the COP,  the Penn attendees say the city of Cali, located in southwestern Colombia, was highly engaged with the conference. “There was a sense that the Colombian government did a good job of involving the city in the conference,” said Jiménez. At COPs, the “Blue Zone” is where official policy negotiations take place, and the Green Zone is where side events take place. At COP16, the Green Zone was in the heart of the city. “It was amazing to see how interested people who live in Cali were into what was happening.”

A variety of presentations, public concerts, field trips to nearby natural areas engaged COP attendees as well as members of the public, and universities held their own events as well. Members of the Penn community took part in one of these side events, hosted by Emilio Latorre of the International Sustainable Campus Network, on Nature Positive Universities, a partnership between the UNEP and Oxford University, to maintain and protect biodiversity on university campuses.

Remaining gaps and policy needs—and how Penn can help

While progress came on some fronts, COP16 negotiations stalled, particularly tripped up by questions of finance, and eventually halted due to a lost quorum. They will be reinitiated in Rome later this month, and further conversation will occur at COP17, to be held in Armenia in 2026.

In critique of the proceedings, Penn attendees noted a lack of nuanced understanding of what nature-based solutions are and how they can be effectively leveraged. “Biodiversity credits were raised, then canceled, then brought back up again,” Lloyd said. 

National commitments on biodiversity conservation were also weak. “It was a mixed result,” Lloyd said. There had been a hope that this COP would propel countries to submit national conservation action countries. While 44 countries did, that leaves more than 150 yet to share theirs. “It’s still a long way to go,” she said.

Several opportunities present themselves for experts from Penn and other academic institutions to contribute to ongoing policymaking. The Penn delegates’ recommendations include:

1) Help facilitate Improved communication around the value of biodiversity conservation. “We don’t know what it actually means if we lose 80% of our insect biodiversity or what it means to lose an apex predator,” said Lloyd. Researchers can play a role in help the public visualize and deeply understand these implications.

2) Academics can also work to make contacts with policymakers to influence policy. This might mean taking part in Blue Zone negotiations, or developing relationships with country delegates through conversations and short write-ups of evidence-backed policy negotiations. Jiménez noted that while not as many academics are represented there, lobbyists, such as agriculture conglomerates (think pesticides and fertilizer companies) are. But conversations with delegates throughout the year can also influence what happens in those closed-doors meetings.

3) Along those lines, Angel Botero observed a strong and growing community of academic researchers engaged in the proceedings. A WhatsApp group with nearly 200 members from universities in attendance at the COP helped organized daily meet-ups, for both formal and informal gatherings and information-sharing. Joining these cross-institutional communities can keep academics in the loop for opportunities to connect their expertise with potential policy outcomes.

4) While less obvious, Jiménez noted that expertise in genetic and biological information is needed to inform discussions of the fair and equitable use of genetic resources. Geneticists and other biologists can contribute valuable perspectives to ensure that the Nagoya Protocol provisions are in alignment with how molecular biology is carried out in practice in research and industry.

5) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just announced the authors who will contribute to a Special Report on Climate Change and Cities. “The academic community can have a lot of sway in these reports,” said Lloyd, contributing expertise at various points in the drafting process.

For more on Penn’s involvement in the United Nations Biodiversity Conference:

How is the World Working to Preserve Biodiversity – Penn Today

A Penn Delegation at COP16, the United Nations Biodiversity Conference – Environmental Innovations Initiative