Biodiversity — it’s climate’s less glitzy twin in the unfolding environmental crisis. And just like climate, it has its own United Nations COP.
This year, COP16 is happening in the tropical city of Cali, Colombia, where from Monday thousands of government representatives, businesses and activists will gather for two weeks of negotiations, events and networking.
The ultimate goal of the COP (which stands for the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity) is to halt and reverse the rapid destruction of our planet’s biodiversity. This year, the focus is on raising the money needed to fund this mammoth task.
It comes two years after the last biodiversity COP in Montreal, where countries agreed on a landmark set of 23 goals known as the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. At the center of it was a commitment to restore 30 percent of the world’s degraded ecosystems by 2030.
