While the Trump administration in Washington was cutting environmental programs, delegates at U.N. biodiversity talks in Rome made modest progress Thursday on a series of measures to support nature.
Governments gathered to tackle global biodiversity losses that are unprecedented in human history, driven by the ways people have transformed the world.
The seismic geopolitical changes of recent weeks loomed over the talks as countries negotiated in a large conference room, fighting for small steps toward consensus. Delegates painstakingly negotiated the language of diplomatic texts even as Britain announced reductions to its overseas development aid and as the United States continued cutting its international aid programs.
“We have sent a light of hope,” said Susana Muhamad, Colombia’s departing environment minister, who presided over the meeting. “The common good — the environment, the protection of life and the capacity to come together for something bigger than each national interest — is possible.”
Many developing countries are rich in biodiversity but poor economically, and three days of tense negotiations centered on whether a new fund would be part of a plan to mobilize $200 billion a year for nature funding by 2030.
African and Latin American countries have demanded a new fund, arguing that the way they currently gain access to multilateral money is unfair and inefficient. But many donor countries have fought their proposed fund, saying it would be expensive to set up and manage, diverting money that could otherwise be spent on conservation itself. In the end, delegates agreed on a process to decide whether a new fund would be created. Still, it was a hard-won compromise and the room erupted in applause.
Delegates also approved a framework for monitoring nations’ progress on biodiversity commitments made in Montreal in 2022, which included an agreement to conserve 30 percent of the world’s land and water.
“We now have a road map to secure the finances required to avert the biodiversity crisis, and the means to monitor and review progress,” said Martin Harper, chief executive of BirdLife International, a science and advocacy group. “These crucial steps must now be backed up with real money from developed nations.”
Countries have recognized a biodiversity financing gap of $700 billion a year. In a landmark agreement in 2022, they agreed to mobilize at least $200 billion a year by 2030 from public and private sources and to find an additional $500 billion a year by 2030 by phasing out or reforming subsidies that harm nature. It’s a huge amount of money to find in five years, even in the most favorable political climate.
The talks unfolded with one country conspicuously absent: the United States.
“I can’t remember the last time the U.S. didn’t show up, but it’s been a very, very long time,” said David Ainsworth, a spokesman for the secretariat that manages the United Nations biodiversity treaty that underlies the talks, the Convention on Biological Diversity.
The United States has long held an awkward but nonetheless influential role in global biodiversity negotiations. It is the only country in the world, with the exception of the Vatican, that has not ratified the treaty. Still, the United States has long wielded considerable influence from the sidelines of the talks.
Now, all that has been thrown into question. In recent years, at least $385 million of U.S. biodiversity funding was funneled through the Agency for International Development, which is being dismantled by the Trump administration. Other streams of U.S. biodiversity funding are also at risk.
The White House did not answer questions on its plans for biodiversity funding or why it did not send delegates to the talks.
Monica Medina, who served as biodiversity envoy in the Biden administration, called the American absence in Rome “a deafening silence” and said cuts to biodiversity funding could result in devastating extinctions.
“U.S. funding has been a very important part of how we have kept some of the biodiversity we all love — elephants, whales, rhinos and polar bears — from going extinct,” Ms. Medina said. “We might not be able to keep some of these amazing animals around for our kids and grandkids without some of this funding.”
The meeting in Rome was a resumption of talks held last fall in Cali, Colombia, officially called the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, or COP16. After reaching a groundbreaking agreement in overtime on a new way for companies to compensate countries for their use of genetic material, the talks lost quorum and were suspended.
One promising outcome of the Rome talks, according to stakeholders, was a move to begin an international dialogue of environment and finance ministers from developed and developing countries.
Over the course of the negotiations, some delegates made impassioned pleas for nature.
“Biodiversity cannot wait for a bureaucratic process that lasts forever while the environmental crisis continues to get worse,” a government delegate from Bolivia told the gathered nations on Wednesday. “Forests are burning, rivers are in agony and animals are disappearing.”