COP16: Reflections on the global biodiversity summit

At the end of October, Mary Ruckelshaus, executive director of the Stanford-based Natural Capital Project (NatCap), and Héctor Angarita, senior scientist at NatCap, traveled to Cali, Colombia to participate in the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Conference, COP16. The event is the nature-focused version of the UN climate conferences (the most recent of which, COP29, just concluded in Azerbaijan). COP16 aimed to make progress toward implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted in 2022, at COP15. Its vision is a world of living in harmony with nature where “by 2050, biodiversity is valued, conserved, restored and wisely used, maintaining ecosystem services, sustaining a healthy planet and delivering benefits essential for all people.” 

 We caught up with Angarita and Ruckelshaus afterward to hear about their experiences.

Tell us a little about why NatCap participated in COP16.  

Angarita: We wanted to support the negotiation process through our work illuminating the functions of nature, to help in reaching the objectives of the Biodiversity Framework. We also wanted to better understand the environment in which we work, to see what countries are hoping to achieve and how we can further support them. 

Ruckelshaus: The work at the CBD COPs has become a lot more relevant to NatCap: people are more interested in implementation, moving out of the academic “Can we do this?” mindset to “How do we do this in ways decision-makers can take and implement?” That is right up our alley at NatCap, where we co-create policy-relevant solutions with implementing partners.

Has NatCap participated in the past?

Ruckelshaus: No, this was our first time, and we met a lot of people there who said this was theirs as well, which reflects how the conversation has shifted. There are now groups like us, who are interested in helping decision-makers drive change by providing practical, technical solutions linking biodiversity to social and economic and cultural metrics. Another major new group was the nature finance community – the people driving investments: private companies and banks, international financial institutions. And third were youth and Indigenous groups, who in many cases are the stewards of nature, and who are crucial to making an impact. 

The groups who have historically attended these meetings were more focused on traditional species preservation for its own sake, whereas these newer groups, when they talk about biodiversity, seem largely focused on nature’s benefits as they connect with people – in other words, ecosystem services, which is of course our focus at NatCap as well.

What events did you participate in and what did you find interesting?

Angarita: I’m a hydrologist so I attended a few events on freshwater biodiversity, and then because of the role of NatCap in contributing to innovation and design of policy and finance applications that internalize nature benefits, we participated in other events focused on the next generation of financial instruments to support nature. I found some of the examples of work being done to redirect harmful subsidies (Target 18 in the Biodiversity Framework) especially interesting. And our work at NatCap can provide information to guide their redesign – such as through modeling the effectiveness and trade-offs of different policies on nature’s benefits to different sectors of the economy.

Ruckelshaus: One really exciting thing about one panel we participated in, hosted by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and focused around our joint People, Planet, Prosperity (3Ps) project, was that all the government representatives were from finance or economic development ministries. That was new. We heard from people – for whom this is not their bread-and-butter topic – about why their country cares about nature, linking it to economic prosperity, livelihoods, etc. We were also part of a panel co-hosted by IDB, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and attended a United Nations Development Programme panel on Blue and Green Islands. 

Can you tell us about anything you saw as especially relevant to informing NatCap’s work?  

Ruckelshaus: One of the most common questions I got about NatCap was, “How are we making an impact?” People wanted to know about the engagement process we use to involve local decision-makers and experts, and figure out policy and finance pathways to impact. It is perhaps the hardest part of what we do, and we’re still working on how to scale that up ourselves, including how to more quickly transfer our approaches to local experts. So clearly, that science-policy transfer and the institutions and resources needed to support it is a big challenge more broadly as well. 

Angarita: One of the biggest emerging themes in the effort to reach the Biodiversity Framework objectives is financing investment in nature. Designing those mechanisms to the scale required is grounded in the kind of work we do. We want to really understand how to develop our tools and workflows in a way that helps answer those more effectively. I think our 3Ps project is creating a dialogue across countries to help us start to answer these questions with more confidence.  

How does what was happening at COP16 intersect with the recent U.N. climate conference, COP29, and/or with climate broadly? 

Ruckelshaus: Over time, the nature element in the climate COPs has been growing. The agendas are overlapping more and more.  

Angarita: Yes, and we saw at COP16 that the narrative used by many countries was a “whole society” approach, promoting the idea that climate and biodiversity need to be viewed together. This should help to make sure we avoid treating them as some sort of equivalent. There are intersections, but it will not always be a win-win for climate and nature. Finding that alignment is part of the challenge: where are those policy windows where we can coherently approach both objectives, and where might there be tradeoffs? Sometimes there might be a premium, an added cost, to considering biodiversity as part of climate action, and vice versa.

Can you reflect on anything you were surprised or inspired by while you were there? 

Ruckelshaus: The overarching news was that countries are not on track to meet the commitments they made in Montreal in 2022. There is a real acknowledgement that this is hard from a governance standpoint, and the finance needs to flow more readily. I felt humility there in the interdependence of these different communities and sectors needed to achieve these goals. The attention on the Indigenous and local communities seemed genuine to me: I felt their power and influence.  

Angarita: I was definitely inspired by the scale of coordination required to put together the collective action to achieve these goals. It also shows how difficult it is. It is easy to be skeptical at how slow the progress is, but this is complex machinery. It needs to trickle down through many levels of government. To see it in action, it brings you hope. We need to hurry up, but many countries are showing their interest, and a sense of urgency.

Another reflection is that biodiversity can mean different things to different people, which allows people to find common ground and learn about others’ perspectives. But it’s also not a neutral term; it carries a value judgment: the more, the better. So some can take pride and lead the call for actions, like Colombia, because their country has so much biodiversity. But I think it also alienates other countries, who think, “Well, we are not as biodiverse, what can we bring to table? How can we make meaningful contributions?” When actually, nature broadly matters a great deal for many reasons, no matter where you are on the planet, not just in connection with how rich your species diversity is.

The Natural Capital Project is based out of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and its Woods Institute for the Environment, and the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences’ Department of Biology. It is a global partnership of interdisciplinary researchers, professionals, and leaders: its core partners are the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the University of Minnesota, The Nature Conservancy, and World Wildlife Fund. NatCap’s work is co-created and implemented through a network of more than 500 collaborators worldwide.