Motts technical director: Cop16 showed biodiversity has a seat at the global infrastructure table

The 2024 United National Biodiversity Conference of the Parties (Cop16) took place from 21 October and 1 November in Cali, Columbia and saw government officials and representatives of the private sector come together to work towards establishing a sustainable future for the world through a framework for increasing biodiversity.

While not all hoped-for conclusions were reached, many positives came out of the event.

Cop16 was attended by a record-breaking 23,000 delegates and Mott MacDonald technical lead for nature services Julia Baker told NCE that this alone showed that collective understanding of biodiversity’s importance has reached new heights.

“We cannot underestimate it,” she said. “Our political leaders cannot ignore the fact that 23,000 delegates were there and all talking about the biodiversity crisis.”

She said this was particularly remarkable given the concurrent global events, including the run up American Presidential Election and the destructive flooding in Spain.

“The fact that Cop happened and put nature on the political agenda is in itself a really important starting point,” she said.

Baker also noted the increased presence and engagement of the private sector at the event, which was a “marked change” from other Cops. This included a wide range of businesses including investors, energy providers, water companies, mining companies and more.

“There was an active voice from the private sector as part of the Cop,” she said. “There was a different conversation about the role that the business sector has in supporting the recovery and enhancement of nature.

“When you reach that point, there’s no going back.”

For infrastructure in particular, Baker believes the there is now unequivocal recognition that we need to work with nature to improve resilience to climate change.

“If we leave nature in a better state than before, that’s exactly what infrastructure needs to thrive in the long term,” she said.

She believes that there is now momentum to take the urgency around improving biodiversity to the same level as the concern around reducing carbon. This will ensure that the sector thinks about its impacts and dependencies on nature across the value chain.

“That’s exactly what we need to thrive as a business, because our supply chains are global and when it comes to the infrastructure industry, there’s a critical dependency on nature,” she said.

Cop16 encouragements and frustrations

Baker believes that Cop16 showed that nature firmly has a seat at the table among private investors and that they recognise “it’s not ‘development versus nature’; it’s about how we can design, build, maintain the infrastructure we need in ways that deliver more for the world”.

Baker said that Cop16 featured “much more conversation about the nature positive momentum and the ways that businesses contribute to that”.

Creation of universally recognised biodiversity metrics was a key topic of discussion, although no consensus was reached.

“We can’t get very far without good data and without biodiversity metrics in this world,” Baker said. “While [Cop16] didn’t answer the question, it moved that agenda forward.”

This included the launch of a global biodiversity metric for infrastructure that is based on the England’s own recently-introduced biodiversity net gain (BNG) legislation.

“We should certainly recognise the influence that BNG is having across the world,” Baker said.

BNG was also a reference point in the discussions about legislation and policies around biodiversity in terms of the role of the private sector versus the role of the consenting system and how it is all regulated.

While Baker believes all of those discussions were positive, she said there needed to be more focus on developing the biodiversity credit market, which will enable the private sector to engage more.

She explained that the private sector is conscious of its need to reduce its impacts and it understands that funding nature recovery projects is key, but businesses need a market mechanism to do this.

However, the conversations about having a rigorous biodiversity credit market that we can trust stalled at Cop16.

“While there’s all there’s all these good aspects about Cop, we actually need regulation,” Baker said. “We need standardisation in the biodiversity credit markets, we need the learning from the carbon credit market.”

She did note that a biodiversity credit market would have to be different from the carbon credit market, though.

“When you invest in a biodiversity credit, you should really invest locally in the site of loss and it should regulate the nature that’s been affected, whereas carbon is much more transactional in that interface.”

So, while Baker is encouraged that questions about regulation, standardisation and integrity of the nascent biodiversity credit market were discussed, she believes “the conversation didn’t go as far as it could have done”.

She said there are concerns for both developers and the conservation sector about whether biodiversity credits have integrity.

“Rightly, there’s a lot of concern about when you buy a biodiversity credit, whether it actually ends up in the hands of a grassroots conservation project,” she said. “There’s a lot of so-called good for biodiversity that can have devastating consequences for local communities, and social equity came up a lot in that discussion.”

How a biodiversity credit market would be regulated has also not become clearer.

“There’s uncertainty about whether government should regulate these types of nature markets, but many governments – especially in the northern hemisphere – just look for market mechanisms to take hold and establish themselves,” she said. “But then it can become slightly chaotic and take longer to establish – and we don’t have time when it comes to nature.”

Baker said there was no conclusion to the debate because there was “an unwillingness for someone to put their hand up and say ‘Yes, I’ll own it’”.

One of the main headlines that has come out of Cop16 is that there was no agreement reached on how direct funding for biodiversity would be handled. At Cop15, which took place in Canada in 2022, an agreement was made to provide developing countries with at least $20bn (£15.4bn) to finance the implementation of conservation targets by 2025, and at least $30bn (£23.1bn) a year by 2030.

With parties disagreeing over the best way to implement this fund, the debate has stretched beyond Cop16.

“There was some expectation among the conservation sector that there would be commitments from international governments about the actual funding, but we know a lot of governments are still facing the economic fall out from Covid,” Baker said.

However, she believes that establishing a biodiversity credit market would also work towards solving this issue.

“It’s the same argument,” she emphasised. “They were held as two different conversations, but we [the private sector] are looking at it and saying ‘well, actually, it’s the same conversation’,” she said.

However, despite the stumbling blocks, Baker said the private sector is “not waiting” when it comes to ensuring biodiversity net gain in its developments.

“I’ve never seen this momentum before, it’s a really exciting place,” she said. “People are realising that this is now material value to our business; this is business critical.”

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