#22 - COP16 - progress on metrics, biodiversity credits, IP, DSI; failure on financing & monitoring
Joshua Berger
CEO de BioInt | Transformer la mesure des impacts & dépendances | Faciliter des actions pragmatiques & fondées sur la science | The Biodiversity Footprint Intelligence Company | Les opinions exprimées sont les miennes
This twenty second issue of The Nature Intelligence Newsletter takes stock of the official negotiations and what happened beyond them. It covers:
A first issue covered what to expect from COP16, the failure of countries to submit their biodiversity national plans, and the TNFD's Nature Data Public Facility (NDPF).
Reminder: what was at stake?
For an intro on what COP16 meant for companies, check Business for Nature's briefing.
In short, three items were negotiated in Cali, Colombia:
1?? Monitoring framework: the exact indicators countries will have to report against
2?? Financing: the sources and amount of funding to achieve the Biodiversity Plan’s targets and the reduction of harmful subsidies
3?? Access & benefit sharing (ABS): a mechanism to share the benefits of the use of biodiversity, and more specifically genetic resources (e.g. when some plants in the Amazon lead to the development of pharmaceutical drugs)
As my post made clear before COP16, hopes were not high to achieve success on the thorny item of financing.
Summary of what was achieved on the three items negotiated
Let's take the items backward.
Access & benefit sharing
This is one of the main successes of COP16: a global fund under the COP has been established to collect the contributions of pharmaceutical, cosmetics, agribusiness, nutraceutical and technology companies benefiting from digital sequence information (DSI, genetic information from plants and animals).
The fund should benefit the “self-identified” needs of Indigenous communities in developing countries, particularly women and youth, as well as developing countries directly.
Payments are however optional and the exact way the money collected will be disbursed is not yet fully clear.
Financing
Unfortunately, but as predicted, negotiations on financing reached a stalemate and on Saturday morning (after the theoretical end of the COP), the quorum was no longer achieved as some delegates had started leaving, so the negotiations stopped. Discussions should resume at a reconvening of COP16, at a yet unknown date.
What was at stake was to mobilise “at least $200bn per year” for biodiversity conservation by 2030 from “all sources”– domestic, international, public and private, with specific targets to be met by developed countries.
The reduction of harmful subsidies was mostly absent from negotiations...?
Monitoring framework
LinkedIn does not allow to embed posts with multiple photos in newsletter, so I am reposting here a post.
What about the Biodiversity Plan's Monitoring framework? None of the posts on COP16 I’ve seen mention it!
?? The Nature Intelligence from COP16 - Episode 08
After 8 exhausting, but fulfilling, days in Cali, I went hiking, bird watching, monkey searching & cocoa touring in northern Colombia. I'm back and here is the final episode of this series! ??
It is about the monitoring of outcomes for biodiversity.
1?? A Monitoring framework hostage of financing discussions
At COP15, an agreement was reached on a Monitoring framework to track progress against the global targets. It contains indicators that all countries should measure (headline & binary) and others that are optional depending on context (component & complementary).
However, there were still holes and it was planned the framework would be refined at COP16. As mentioned in Episode 01 of this series, this was among the 3 topics to be negotiated in Cali https://t.ly/uvpT6
Unfortunately, the failure of countries to agree on one of the other 2 topics, financing, had the ripple effect of derailing agreement on the Monitoring framework. Without an agreement on how to finance the implementation of the targets the thinking went, there was no point in agreeing how to monitor their achievement.
This means that the stock take of parties’ progress planned for COP17 will probably be led with the indicators agreed in Montreal. The latest draft of the monitoring framework sent to parties on 1 Nov. may nonetheless be taken as the basis for future negotiations. It still includes metrics used by businesses such as:
- Ecosystem Integrity Index and Biodiversity Intactness Index (EII and BII, Goal A component indicators)
- Mean Species Abundance (MSA, Goal A complementary indicator)
- Species Threat Abatement and Restoration metric (STAR, Target 4 complementary indicator)
2?? Monitoring corporate trajectories aligned with a Nature Positive world
On the 30th, I had the pleasure to speak at an event focused on accounting for positive & negative biodiversity impacts. In the end, the aim is to assess how businesses contribute to achieving the Biodiversity Plan, i.e. monitoring at the level of companies and not States.
I highlighted the questions identified as part of the preparation for an Ecosystem Condition Protocol, which still require consensus and/or answers:
- Definitions of negative, reduced, avoided, positive, potential vs actual impacts, baseline vs counterfactual scenario
- At which scale should outcomes be measured (site, landscape…)?
- How to reconcile direct measurement and pressure-based modelling?
- Criteria for good metrics?
- How to attribute responsibility (e.g. for co-products or landscapes influencing sites)
- Criteria to claim a contribution to a Nature Positive world?
Indigenous People and Local Communities
A permanent subsidiary body on Indigenous peoples and local communities (IP&LCs) was established under the CBD and a work programme focused on IP&LCs was also approved. This was the second major achievement of COP16.
Going further
If you want to deep dive into the outcomes from Cali, I encourage to read:
Beyond the negotiations: progress on metrics and biodiversity credits
With reportedly 3 times more participants from the private sector than during COP15 in Montreal present in Cali, there was a whirlwind of side-events and discussions beyond the official negotiations. It is hard to gauge the progress these achieved, but I feel confident assessing the direction of travel for at least two topics: metrics and biodiversity credits.
The convergence on indicators and metrics continues
I have been working on biodiversity indicators & metrics (in a corporate context) convergence since 2018. After the Aligning Biodiversity Measurements for Business (ABMB) project roughly from 2018 to 2020, I was part of the EU-funded Align project from 2021 to 2024. Align informed the indicators chosen by the revised Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) 's biodiversity standard, the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD) and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive's ESRS-E4 on biodiversity.
Today, the Nature Positive Initiative is pushing further the convergence on high-level categories of indicators, as explained in the post below.
Biodiversity credits: continued dynamism but no maturity yet
The post above also touches upon biodiversity credits and illustrate both the continued dynamism of the topic (with the release of Verra's framework) and the start of convergence on high-level principles.
Continuation of other trends could also be observed in Cali, as Simas Gradeckas perfectly captured:
As a side-event I co-organized on indicators & metrics for biodiversity credit showed, we are still in a "explosion of innovation" phase and standardization & consolidation has yet to happen.
Cain Blythe from CreditNature made some very good points, on which I'd like to conclude this issue (I cannot integrate his post directly as it contains multiple photos, but here are his key points):
1. High-Integrity Frameworks and Principles Are Essential:
[...] Without rigorous standards, we risk repeating the pitfalls of carbon markets, where commercial priorities seem to outweigh integrity.
2. Biodiversity Credits as a Driver for Large-scale Nature Restoration:
[Biodiversity] credits present an opportunity to actively regenerate degraded ecosystems and provide resources needed to IPs&LCs to protect biodiversity hotspots. Discussions with corporates at the event emphasised that many are interested in holistic investments that include the ability to invest in climate and biodiversity related outcomes.
3. The Power of Demonstration:
Case studies shared at COP16 show how credits can fund conservation and rewilding projects, as well as involve IPs & LCs. Covering marine ecosystems as well as terrestrial, high integrity projects involve IPs & LCs in designing and managing these frameworks, recognising their role as custodians.
4. Transparency and Accountability:
Technology is a powerful enabler. Examples of tools that can transform complex ecosystem data into standardised, auditable credits, enhance both accountability and scalability.
Please share your thoughts in comments! And please let me know if there is a topic you'd like me to cover in the future!
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Disclaimer: all views are mine and do not represent any institution or initiative's.
Access previous issues of the Nature Intelligence Newsletter:
Case studies and examples
#01 - Impacts on ecosystem integrity of a listed equity index assessed for the first time - STOXX600
Ecosystem condition definition and metrics
Biodiversity measurement tools
Biodiversity credits
Align
The Ecosystem Condition Protocol (EC Protocol)
COP16
Credits: the cover of this issue was made using Bing Copilot Designer.
CTO @ EcoTropics Inc | Sustainable Digital Transformation | NatureTech | ClimaTech | CleanTech | AI
2 周My 2 cents after 16 COPs and another 29 taking place in Mars for 2030 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03333-1
Program Manager - Business Engagement and Mainstreaming at UN Biodiversity
2 周Joshua Berger, maybe we should try to focus on the positive here. There were more than 20 agenda items to be negotiated for COP alone (with many more related to the MOPs) and we had an agreement on all but three major items. This was also the largest meeting ever held by the CBD with wide participation from all sectors of society including a very strong participation from economic sectors. We had 324 side events, 11 thematic days, over 300 events/dialogues in Place Quebec, and 10 summits including a very successful Business and Biodiversity Forum and a Finace and Biodiversity Day. I personally would not count that as a poor result by any means...
Senior Geospatial Data Scientist / Independent Researcher
2 周Thanks for the write-up; this is very informative content! Eduardo Gonzalez, for your information, in case you missed the item.