Brian O’Donnell, the director of Campaign for Nature, a conservation advocacy group based in Durango, Colorado, says that the success of the framework depends on donor countries making good on their pledges to increase biodiversity funding. In addition to agreeing to contribute $30 billion annually by 2030, wealthy countries said that they would help to find $200 billion per year from private and public sources by 2030. But the countries have not yet started to deliver on these promises.
Daniel Mukubi, a negotiator of the biodiversity-framework deal for the Democratic Republic of the Congo who is based in Kinshasa, toldthat some nations are not happy and are holding out for an independent fund. LMICs don’t have an adequate say in how the GEF funds are spent, he says. The DRC and other LMICs will not agree to the trust fund until after discussions on an independent fund, he adds. “We will not give up.
These tensions could delay the trust fund’s adoption, which was planned for a GEF assembly in August, delaying biodiversity action even more — as it is, the Kunming-Montreal framework was agreed two years late, owing to the COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, the clock is ticking: researchers have estimated thatdoi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-01988-w: An earlier version of this story stated that a Global Environment Facility assembly will take place in September. It is planned for August.