Navigating the UN biodiversity summit COP16 as an ecology student

For an ecology student like myself, conservation work involves wandering the forest with a hypothesis, collecting data and running experiments.

- Muhammad Nasry Abdul Nasir

But in the last two weeks of October, I was exposed to a very different side of conservation during the UN biodiversity conference, COP16, in Cali, Colombia.

This event, held under the auspices of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, serves as the first conference since the adoption of the historic Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework in 2022.

That treaty—touted as the biodiversity equivalent of the Paris Agreement on climate change—aims to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.

It was my first time attending an international event of this scale.

The experience of running from room to room and meeting all sorts of people was incredibly overwhelming.

But it proved enlightening in a few ways.

SEMANTICS

For one thing, it showed the difficulty in getting almost 200 countries to agree on a road map to protect nature.

I sat through a discussion where negotiators actually debated for 10 minutes over whether to include a full stop and a comma in a sentence.

While situations like these can seem amusing, I also recognized the repercussions of a single word change on countries. For example, in a discussion on international commitments for funding, some parties pushed for the word "should" instead of "could".

Within the UN negotiations, "should" is stronger language that translates to heavier obligations for contributors for funding.

It is little wonder then, that negotiations progress at a snail's pace, as the negotiations require consensus from all parties to proceed.

One of the key expectations from COP16 was that countries would agree on indicators that would allow progress in protecting and restoring nature to be tracked.