What’s the biodiversity COP all about?

summit for that this week. We're going to the heart of Colombia to unpack cop 16. Hi and welcome to Climate Conversations. I'm Jack Boyd. Hello, leading Tan. How's it going? Hi, Jack, it's going well. I I, I'm kind of laughing over what you said just now. There is a summit for that. There is an app for that. There's a reason to travel far distances to talk about that. Ever made it over to Colombia or South America in your time. Now, my closest I've been to is Cuba,

I've been to Cuba, but that's not really. Yeah, that's the closest I've been to South America. So, and I think Cuba gets, gives me some, some street cred. So there you go. What about you, Jack have you been to Bogota Colombia or anywhere use your interviewing skills. This is a conversation. No, I have not been there. I have been to South America. I've been to Argentina Chile and Brazil a couple of times on assignment for CN A. Maybe we'll go there together next year. Who knows? Cop 30 in Brazil?

I hope so. Let's try and do that. That'll be so exciting. OK. Quiz time talking all things biodiversity. Li Ling. Can you tell me the top three most diverse countries in the world? Now, this is based on an index made by Mounga Bay. It's basically using groups of animals. So, amphibians, birds, fish, mammals, reptiles and then plants as well. Ok. So basically everything, not everything, not everything. There's other things, animals, fish, mammals, reptiles, plants, amphibians, birds,

so not insects, correct. There are some other asterisks as well, not all types of plants either, but it doesn't include invertebrates, fungi, micro organisms and a number of other types. This just gives you an idea of how complex biodiversity. All right, I'm gonna have to do an educated guess. I, I feel like I kinda can roughly identify which countries, but let me chew on it for a little bit. Sounds good answers at the end.

OK. News time, Li Ling take us through some stories that you found this week. So in the vein of being completely positive as we have been over the past two weeks, we have been do you know the optimism in my voice? I can hear it. I'm going to start with some good news this week. So the Philippines has seen clean energy start ups jump a staggering six fold since 2020. And that's according to a recent report from New Energy nexus and

international Clean Energy Nonprofit. So currently the country has about 91 start ups in the clean energy and climate space and that's compared with 15, just four years ago. So that's six times as many, just about slightly more than a third are in Metropolitan Manila. And the rest are more or less split between Calabar Zone and northern Mindanao in the south. Now nearly half are in renewable energy and the rest range from clean

transportation to waste management. But and there's always a but right, but the study also pointed out that the support system for these entrepreneurs need to catch up. So the start up space is still lacking, you know, needed and sufficient access to networks to funding to testing facilities as well as training. And without this experts are saying the growth could lose momentum. For example, the space could do with more support from the public sector by way of policies

and also from the private sector through investments, for instance. Yeah, I read the story um on eco business in the last few days, I think it's really cool to see that there are so many start ups happening in that space and not all of them are in Manila. So interesting trend and yeah, hopefully the money can follow. Yeah, I think it also really kind of underscores some of the the complexities and actually deliver on a lot of these support for renewable energy, right?

Because a lot of it requires the system in place, the networks in place to actually, you know, support these this emerging sector and very often that there just aren't enough of it. But Filipinos full of good ideas. Always next up. Also good news from the climate perspective. Great Britain has shut down its last coal plant. Um So that's, that was a bit. We were activist there. Yeah. Ok. So no woohoo, but it took it as a win

for the climate fight. So the Ratcliffe on saw plant in Central England closed on September 30th ending 100 and 42 years of coal fired electricity nation where the industrial revolution began coal powered steam engines that demand for metals and minerals and that gave rise to mighty industries for those of you who need a little bit of the history lesson. So the UK was the first country to actually lock in a deadline to

phase out coal power by 2025. It's part of a bolder plan to transition the country to renewable power by 2030 it is among the first countries in the world to phase out coal. So this made me wonder how many active coal plants are left in the world. Jack, can you make a guess wild guess how many active coal plants roughly, I mean, some are shutting down but not that many. I think that the UK would be a rare story of a country really cutting out all of its coal. China still

has new coal. Indonesia has quite a lot still going on. I've got no idea. Plants 1000 not quite as of July. This year, there were more than 2400 active operating coal plants. And that's according to statistic. But you know, the good news is it's been decreasing since 2021 as countries face it out. And you mentioned China, I think China accounts for nearly half of that figure. The writing is on the wall for coal, that's for sure. It is um on the industry. Yeah,

the economic fundamentals are just not there anymore. But yeah, countries like China still need it to power their economy. So yeah, it'll take a few decades. All right, it's time for our main story this week. We tend to talk about one of the major cops quite often the conference of the parties. That's what cops stands for, that focuses on climate change that has delivered

us the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement. There's another cop that collectively I feel gets a little bit overlooked outside of those who are intimately following the proceedings who are involved with it. That is the cop on biodiversity and it's happening soon in just over a week, cop 16 is being hosted in the city of Cali in Colombia. Plenty of heads of state ministers from across the world traveling there to attend

now while it's happening in South America. What's discussed there actually matters for the whole world and there's plenty on the table. In short, there are lots of concerns about a biodiversity crisis happening across the globe. One key goal is advancing the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity framework. Now this is a big deal. It's kind of compared to the Paris Agreement in terms of its scope. Le you want to give us the low down on exactly what that mouthful of a framework is. I thought you'd

never ask. So the Kunming Montreal Global Biodiversity framework is a landmark agreement reached by 100 and 96 countries back in 2022 at cop 15, it's been called the Agreement for Nature and its purpose is to stop and reverse biodiversity loss. So it's a huge huge deal. Now, it has four key goals to guide global efforts to conserve biodiversity by 2050. And they include ways to protect and expand natural ecosystems

and stop species extinction caused by us humans. And it wants to do this by reducing the risk of extinction by tenfold. And that's just the first of the four goals. The others involve the sustainable use of biodiversity and natural resources and the fair sharing and usage of genetic resources. For example, when it comes to indigenous people and local communities such as the use of intellectual property laws to protect traditional knowledge around say for instance,

the medicinal use of plants found in local communities. Right? It's interesting. Yeah. Now there are also goals around scientific knowledge sharing and technology transfers and especially around financing particularly for developing countries and small island developing states, right? And they a checklist of things that they want to accomplish, right? A lot of targets. You want to tell us all

of the targets. No, I do not. I won't go through all the 23 but I will tell you some of the key targets and one of them is to bring the loss of areas with high concentrated biodiversity to zero. So bring that loss to zero and also restore what's already been degraded. So there are also rules to conserve and manage land and water bodies as well as target invasive species and also reduce pollution. So to do all this, you know, money is a

big factor. So one of the major targets is to mobilize at least $200 billion a year from public and

private sources by 2030. Now, what's really important Jack is that and you know this as well as you know, a lot of us who watch this biodiversity space is that this agreement, this framework is quite unprecedented and it comes as we are undergoing an extinction event right now due to human activities, right, a skill of biodiversity loss known as the Holocene extinction, which is the sixth mass extinction event in the history

of the earth. And it's happening right now. It is thought you were bringing only good news this week and you just brought up the extinction. I went back to factory settings, a little reset button has been pressed, but that is a great introduction to what we're talking about here. It is a globally significant event for the future of the planet.

These discussions really matter. And I think what's also fascinating about this cop is the location and Colombia is one of the most dangerous places in the world for environmental defenders and journalists, the very people who are standing up for biodiversity or informing our knowledge of what's going on. So lots of intersecting interests that happen in a place like Colombia. So let's explore that more. We're joined now by journalist

Oliver Griffin from Thomson Reuters. He reports on environmental and energy issues from his HQ in Bogota Colombia. Thank you for having me now. It's been a while since the biodiversity cop landed in South America. I'm sure you weren't there the last time it was in Brazil about 20 years ago. But what does it mean actually to have such significant talks on the continent coming up?

We're expecting scores of government delegations, around a dozen heads of state and government leaders come enjoying the proceedings in cop 16. So it's definitely something that they've put a lot of work into. And there's a lot of excitement about what that might mean for the country more broadly in terms of the top environmental issues of the day,

environmental reports in the region. There's a lot of very talented um Colombian reporters and international reporters covering things from say across, let's call it the Spanish fringe of the Amazon, the part of the northern bit of the rain forest, which is predominantly Spanish, speaking, a lot of the issues to do with most recently are ones that you see they come out of Brazil to do with issues, the drought issues with forest fires, the usual kind of stuff.

But I think as well, what a lot of people can forget is that unlike say Brazil, where obviously the vast majority of the Amazon is, we also have a lot of kind of different ecosystems to be reporting on across say the whole range of different altitudes that are in countries like Colombia and Ecuador, you know, Bogota, is it 2800 m, I think, which obviously means that's a starkly different environment to what you might see in the rainforest or uh in the Ku region.

So there's a lot of different kind of topics to be covering in the environment. And I think another issue that we can't really forget is that there are certainly dangerous to environmental reporting in this kind of region. Not that I feel that I've suffered from that myself, but we can't forget in neighboring Brazil, the murder of Dom Phipps and Bruno Pereira in 2022. So it's certainly not that as risks either. Uh

I think in the five years that I've been here, that has been the case in Latin America in particular, going back to what does this mean for the continent? You know, Latin America is far and away the leader in terms of how environmentalists are treated poorly and killed for their work. We've done a lot of stories on this from Reuters, Bogota. Um I think there are definitely activists that hope that this is their opportunity to speak up and get an audience for the issues that they really face.

It's something we continue to see this year. It's a real issue that environment continue to face, especially in Colombia, but also obviously in, in those other neighboring countries as well. I think it will be interesting to see if cop succeeded to shine a light on that. It's one thing I think sometimes it's easy to forget the humans that are on

the front lines of conservation. And I think that hopefully this could be an opportunity for them to put forth their position and, and get some attention for what they're trying to draw attention to

environmentalist killings in the country. Obviously, Colombia reached a peace agreement with the FARC in 2016. But that is by no means the end of the country's internal arm conflict, there are still other groups active in the country. And so those are the people that security saw and other members of the government would say are threatening particularly environments like this and environmentalists throughout the country.

I'm also gonna be looking for synergies between the climate cop made famous by the parrot Climates Agreement and also this biodiversity c and we've spoken to a few people that have really hammered home, how without protecting nature? These experts say we can't necessarily guarantee or we won't

guarantee success in dealing with the climate challenges either. So it's gonna be really interesting for me personally, how those two could potentially work, especially with the next climate cop coming up in around, I think the end of the month and then obviously COP 30 which is the one that people are already talking about for next year.

I think it's another thing entirely to have your eyes sting from the smoke and be able to smell that kind of burning and see flames spring up from the side of a road that your guide is telling you wasn't even there until maybe a few weeks ago, months ago. So I think seeing, I guess deforestation in real time was absolutely the most surprising thing. Um, I say

so bizarre. There's this huge dissonance when it comes to that kind of thing and it's probably a fraction of what you were experiencing when you saw all that unfolding right there. But I can't imagine it

so negatively so soon afterwards. It was, yeah, it was very jarring to be in those two situations so close together.

Especially from the UK. You know, it's not normal that someone is advising you when you're moving from uh brit to bring wet, wet weather clothes, but that was the case. And this year um Bogota has had water rationing. Ecuador has had to implement a series of power cuts to ration water in their own kind of, you know, for use in their own hydroelectric dams.

And these are traditionally very wet places and people, experts and scientists who we've spoken to have very put squarely put that on climate change and the El Nino phenomenon that was exacerbated by climate change. And it does feel like we were just saying earlier with the flames that we saw with deforestation in real time. It really does feel that it's you can see climate change happening around you with the way that people are

commenting on different weather phenomena. This stuff isn't uh quite right.

But what we, I think we do know is that there is a shortfall in how much money has been promised and how much organizers other countries with, with all the nature say is needed to help them protect that. So I'm sure that will be uh a key issue. But I think one thing that's clear from the people we've spoken to is that this cop is very much as an implementation cop. So it's about how

things are going and how things are progressing. Those are the kind of key issues that people are expecting to see come up and check in on how everything is working out. So I don't know to what extent we can expect big announcements with lots of glitter and stuff. But I think we have to wait and see to see how they get on in the two weeks that go in from around the end

on that? It reminds me a lot of the climate cops where we hear about these huge amounts of finance that are being promised that are being pledged, but nobody can say how much is going to be announced. Nobody can say how much is actually been mobilized. It's all it's in this convoluted multilateral system. And I can see the mirroring of these frustrating processes in the climate cop actually playing out in the biodiversity cop too.

When I was at the UN, we would spend just a whole day just trying to sift through all the noise just to get one spreadsheet about which country is donating how much when to expect it. It is just there's so many layers just to get to that information in this pursuit of transparency. You think that they make it a lot easier. What's your strategy Ollie to finding that out and letting us all know,

clearly incredibly complicated the funding for them as well. And so it's never straightforward with how this kind of what these different announcements mean or or what the various funding means. So we'll obviously wait with beta breath to see how that comes out and, and how that develops over the cop 16.

to sustain that kind of a population. And we kind of heard quite a bit about this country. So I'm gonna go with Brazil at number one. Correct. Brazil is number one. Ok. I think I know what the next two are. They're not quite as obvious. Well, one of them might be quite obvious but they're not quite as obvious. I just don't know what, which comes before the other. So I know Indonesia has to be the other one and I'm gonna go with China. So Brazil, I think Indonesia.

All right. So China, China, no, is correct. Three from 30 my God. I was kind of leaning towards to Australia, but I don't think Australia is that far. The number seven on the list. Australia and Colombia, the country we've been talking about is number four. No way. Oh, wow. People are gonna think this is a conspiracy now that you're just getting all of these correct every week. No, I did pretty badly. Last week I got the one with uh Catherine Hay. Correct. But last week I think

I only got 11 country out of four. Right. I can't remember what it was, but I totally crashed on burn. Last week. You didn't? This week you've come through this week was quite easy. I think this one was quite obvious. Thank you. Alright. That's it for climate conversations. Thanks as always for joining us and we'll be back next week until then. I'm Li Ling Tan. Bye bye for now and I'm Jack Board.

Thanks as always to the team that put together this podcast, Tiffany Janani, Jahari, Christina Robert and Sai Ying.