The MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative’s (ESI’s) Primer of COP16

By: Marcela Ángel, Research Program Director, MIT ESI; Silvia Duque, MIT Master in City Planning student; and Hannah Leung, MIT Master in City Planning and Master of Science in Real Estate student

This year’s 16th global Conference of the Parties (COP16) for the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was held in Cali, Colombia from Oct. 21 to Nov. 1. It was a gathering of governments, NGOs, businesses, academic institutions, and practitioners focused on stopping global biodiversity loss and advancing the 23 goals of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) — an international agreement adopted in 2022 to guide global efforts to protect and restore biodiversity through 2030. 

Under Colombia’s ambitious vision of creating peace with nature — and with the participation of a record number of 23,000 delegates, five heads of state, and more than 150 ministers and vice ministers — COP16 achieved important milestones of the KMGBF and more broadly helped raise public awareness on biodiversity challenges and potential solutions. 

The conference, based on COP tradition, was held in two designated venues: the Green and Blue Zones. The Blue Zone is the space for formal negotiations and closed conversations intended for registered delegates, while the Green Zone is open to the public and focused on showcasing relevant initiatives across businesses and raising public awareness. COP16’s Green Zone was also the first to be held in a public space, as it was in Cali’s city center, which was able to increase the general public’s exposure to the urgent needs of biodiversity conservation and potential solutions. Given this location, it was also able to reach about a million visits.

In addition to incremental agreements and coalitions formed behind closed doors, there were multiple notable breakthroughs, including:

  1. the launch of the Cali Fund which mandates companies that use digital sequence information (DSI) from biodiversity genetic resources to share half of their profits with Indigenous peoples and local communities;
  2. a work program and subsidiary body under Article 8(j) of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) addresses the “traditional knowledge, innovations, and practices” of Indigenous, and local communities and sets up a mechanism that guarantees formal participation of Afro-descendants, Indigenous peoples, and local communities in decision-making processes under the UN biodiversity convention; and
  3. a global agreement to identify and conserve marine areas of high ecological importance in international waters, strengthening global ocean governance. 

MIT delegates attend COP16 in Cali, Colombia. From left to right: Kevin Lin Yang, MIT Technology and Policy Program student; Marcela Angel, Research Program Director at the MIT ESI; Hannah Leung, MIT Master in City Planning and Master of Science in Real Estate student; and Silvia Duque, MIT Master in City Planning student.

Despite these breakthroughs, several key issues are still left unresolved, particularly around funding and monitoring of targets in data-poor contexts. Most international organizations agree that there is still a major financial gap to meet the 2030 goals. The annual climate finance needed to match countries’ climate action goals is currently at $8.1 trillion USD, and will steadily increase to over $10 trillion USD from 2031 to 2050, marking a sixfold increase from $1.3 trillion USD in the year 2021. These financial concerns were echoed across multiple sessions across COP16, and they are agreed to be a common barrier to achieving various countries’ climate goals.

MIT’s engagement, led by the MIT ESI, included the participation of over 10 delegates — including faculty, researchers, and students — from groups including the MIT ESI; the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS); the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP); the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and MIT’s Center for Sustainability Science and Strategy. They each participated in major roundtables and presented research to fellow delegates in over 15 spaces across the Blue and Green Zones. 

Please keep an eye out for a follow-up article that will detail more of MIT and the MIT ESI’s involvement in COP16.