UN talks on saving nature stumble on finance hurdle [Video]

The world’s biggest nature conservation conference closed in Colombia on Saturday with no agreement on a roadmap to ramp up funding for species protection.

The 16th Conference of Parties (COP16) to the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was suspended by its president Susana Muhamad as negotiations ran almost 12 hours longer than planned and delegates started leaving to catch flights.

The exodus left the summit without a quorum for decision-making, but CBD spokesman David Ainsworth told AFP it will resume at a later date to consider outstanding issues.

The conference, the biggest meeting of its kind yet, with around 23,000 registered delegates, was tasked with assessing, and ramping up, progress toward an agreement reached in Canada two years ago to halt humankind’s rapacious destruction of nature’s bounty.

The Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework that emerged from that meeting had set 23 targets to be met in just over five years …