Talks on halting nature loss run into extra time in Colombia [Video]

Negotiations at the world’s biggest nature conservation conference ran hours into overtime in Cali, Colombia on Saturday, with talks deadlocked on funding for efforts to “halt and reverse” species loss.

A closing plenary session, scheduled for Friday evening, started more than four hours late as groups of negotiators huddled behind closed doors seeking to iron out their differences.

The 16th Conference of Parties (COP16) to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) opened on October 21 and was scheduled to close Friday.

Asked by a delegate at around 1:00 am (0600 GMT) on Saturday how much longer the meeting would last, COP16 president Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s environment minister, replied: “Until victory.”

The conference, the biggest meeting of its kind with around 23,000 registered delegates, is a follow-up to an agreement reached two years ago in Canada.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework that emerged from COP15 identified 23 targets to halt …