Biodiversity and Climate Change: From Cali to Baku. COP-16 Client Brief

Climate change and the biodiversity crisis are interwoven, as are the possible solutions to tackle these problems. Climate goals cannot be achieved without nature; and achieving biodiversity goals depends on mitigating and adapting to climate change.

The Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) have called for cooperation between the United Nations’ climate and biodiversity Conventions for a long time. Finally, there is a chance that the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change will hear the call to work together.

The increasing number of climate experts present at the 16th session of the Conference of the Parties to the CBD (COP-16) confirms a growing understanding among the climate community of the relevance of nature. The 2015 Paris Agreement and the 2021 Global Biodiversity Framework are increasingly understood to be inextricably linked—the biodiversity and climate crises must be solved together.

Against this backdrop, Climate Focus’s brief “Biodiversity and Climate Change: From Cali to Baku” summarizes the main outcomes of COP-16 with an emphasis on comparison to the Paris Agreement and relevant first conclusions for climate policy.

The brief covers:

• A comparison of the Paris Agreement and the Global Biodiversity Framework, including how the accords complement each other, their implementation at the national level, and their review at the global level;
• The lack of progress on finance for biodiversity;
• A groundbreaking funding mechanism for sharing benefits from using genetic information of plants and animals;
• Successes for the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities; and
• Considerations of and decisions on climate change at COP-16.