UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres will make a video address to guests gathered for the event attended by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who on Friday said he was "nervous" about security.
The high-stakes UN biodiversity gathering officially opens Monday under the protection of thousands of Colombian police and soldiers, aided by UN and US security personnel.
Armed police could be seen patrolling the city center, conference venue and airport Sunday.
About 12,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries, including 140 government ministers and a dozen heads of state are due to attend the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), running until November 1.
Themed "Peace with Nature," it has the urgent task of coming up with monitoring and funding mechanisms to ensure that 23 UN targets agreed in 2022 to halt and reverse species destruction can be met by 2030.
But Colombia's EMC rebel group, a splinter of the FARC guerrilla army that disbanded in 2017, has cast a shadow over the event by urging foreign delegations to stay away and warning the conference "will fail."
The threat came after EMC fighters were targeted in a military raid in the southwest Cauca department, where the group is accused of engaging in drug trafficking and illegal mining.
Cali is the nearest big city to territory controlled by the EMC, which has been engaged in fraught peace negotiations with the government.
Petro said Friday: "We are all nervous (hoping) that nothing bad happens... There are those who would like it (the meeting) to be a showcase of violence and death."
Cali's mayor Alejandro Eder insisted, however, that "we have been working since February to safeguard the city of Cali... We have more than 10,000 police officers, we also have detachments of the Colombian Armed Forces guarding the entire perimeter of the city. We have air protection, protection against drones."
- Time running out -
The delegates have their work cut out for them, with just five years left to achieve the UN goal of placing 30 percent of land and sea areas under protection by 2030.
World-renowned British primate expert Jane Goodall warned ahead of the summit that there was little time to reverse the downward slide.
"The time for words and false promises is past if we want to save the planet," Goodall told AFP this week.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which keeps a red list of threatened animals and plants, more than a quarter of assessed species -- about a million altogether -- are threatened with extinction.
To try to reverse the trend, the so-called Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework adopted ambitious targets for 2030, progress on which COP16 is meant to assess.
Carlos Ignacio, a representative of a Guatemalan Indigenous association who traveled to Cali for the event, told AFP he hoped that COP decisions will be "driven by nature, not business. Because what's the point of having money if I don't have a place to live?"
Host Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, and Petro has made environmental protection a priority.
But the country has struggled to extricate itself from six decades of armed conflict between leftist guerrillas such as the EMC, right-wing paramilitaries, drug gangs, and the state.
UN biodiversity conference: what's at stake?
Paris (AFP) Oct 20, 2024 -
The world's pledges to halt humankind's destruction of nature will be put to the test when the 16th UN conference on biodiversity opens Monday in Colombia.
The COP16, held in the city of Cali through November 1, is the first meeting of the international community since the adoption two years ago of an unprecedented roadmap to achieve that goal.
But putting that agreement into practice risks not moving fast enough to stop the destruction of land, oceans and species by a 2030 target date.
How will COP16 ensure countries achieve the 23 targets of the "Global Biodiversity Framework"? Can it unlock the billions of dollars needed? Can it guarantee the rights of Indigenous peoples?
Here's a summary of what's at stake:
- Delivering on promises -
Creating protected areas, restoring depleted land, cutting the use of pesticides, increasing funding for nature -- few of the targets humanity had previously set for 2020 have been reached.
To avoid repeating that failure, countries agreed at COP15 to create a monitoring mechanism, with common indicators to measure progress, and a possible review procedure.
But the details of this mechanism, crucial for holding countries to account, remain to be adopted.
Carrying out this negotiation will be the top agenda item of COP16 and its host Colombia, which wants to establish itself as a leader in the global fight to safeguard nature.
But parallel negotiations, notably financial, will also come into play.
- Securing national plans -
As of mid-October, only 29 countries out of 196 had submitted national biodiversity strategies to reflect their share of global efforts.
And 91 have submitted "national targets", or commitments on all or part of the targets, according to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity.
Several countries could publish their plan in Cali, and those of Colombia and Brazil are keenly awaited.
Some 12,000 delegates, including seven heads of state, are expected to attend COP16.
Under the spotlight, notably, will be the flagship target of the global framework: to place 30 percent of land and sea areas under minimum protection by 2030.
As of September, 8.35 percent of the seas and 17.5 percent of land were considered protected, according to the WWF environmental group, which uses preliminary data from the UN -- in other words, barely more than in 2022.
- Unlocking funding -
The efforts of rich countries to finance those of the developing world will be central to debates in Cali.
Developed countries have committed to providing $20 billion per year for biodiversity by 2025 and $30 billion by 2030.
By 2022, $15.4 billion had been raised, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
Developing countries will also revive their calls for creating an autonomous fund, which is a major point of contention for rich countries, which are categorically opposed to setting up multiple funds.
To unlock private finance, biodiversity credits will be another major issue.
- Biopiracy -
"Biopiracy" -- the use of genetic resources in everything from cosmetics to seeds, medicines, biotechnology and food supplements without the agreement of those who preserve this traditional knowledge -- is a particularly knotty issue in negotiations.
Since 2014, the Nagoya protocol, which stipulates that persons providing genetic resources or traditional knowledge should benefit from the advantages arising from their use, has made it possible to pay for each use of a plant or animal.
However, these resources have become digitised genetic sequences or DSI (Digital Sequence Information) that almost exclusively benefit rich economies.
Resolving this is a priority for many developing countries and an agreement could be found in Cali to establish a global profit-sharing scheme.
But which companies will contribute? Will it be on a voluntary or compulsory basis? And how will the money be distributed?
"If a mandatory contribution of 0.1 percent is adopted, this potentially represents a billion dollars," said Sebastien Treyer, executive director of French think tank Iddri.
- Indigenous populations -
Indigenous populations are well represented at biodiversity COPs but often emerge the most disappointed by final decisions.
This year, they intend to use the summit taking place on the edge of the Amazon to have their rights and ancestral knowledge recognised, after years of marginalisation and forced displacement.
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