The European Union (EU), one of the main partners in organizing COP16 on biodiversity, which opens Monday in Cali, Colombia, hopes this forum will be the moment to “move from words to action.””We share Colombia’s ambition to make this international meeting a people’s COP,” EU ambassador to Colombia, Gilles Bertrand, said.
The main UN biodiversity conference kicks off this Sunday with its opening ceremony. Early in the day, Cali welcomed some of the 12,000 visitors expected for the 11-day event. “The EU and its member countries are convinced that nature and biodiversity conservation is done with people,” Bertrand said. Alongside the “blue zone,” managed by the UN where negotiations will take place, several cultural events are planned. In the “green zone,” open to the public in the city center, some demonstrations are expected.
“After the historic Kunming-Montreal agreement on a global biodiversity framework, it’s time for everyone to move from words to action, with appropriate financing mechanisms and clear, effective, and measurable national goals and policies,” emphasized the diplomat.Colombia hopes that the Cali summit will boost the still limited implementation of conservation goals for 2030.
Participants from 200 countries, including 140 ministers and 12 heads of state, are expected, under the protection of around 11,000 Colombian police and soldiers, supported by UN and U.S. security personnel.
Colombia has a long tradition of cooperation with indigenous, Afro-descendant, and peasant communities, as well as others in its most remote regions and in areas where the country hosts strategic ecosystems, according to Bertrand.This experience demonstrates that it is “perfectly possible to profoundly transform the rural economy and live much better from nature, protecting it and using it sustainably,” he said.
The events organized alongside the summit “aim to bring together in Cali the ancestral knowledge of the scientific community, the voices of innovation and the private sector, civil society, and others, to build together nothing less than a new economy in harmony with nature and humans,” the European ambassador said. “The idea is for these actors to come together, listen to each other, and influence the negotiations,” he concluded.
As a country renowned for its biodiversity, Costa Rica will be closely watching the outcomes of this important summit, which could have significant implications for our own conservation and sustainable development policies.
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