You may have heard of Cop29, the global climate change conference that doesn’t start until 11 November but has already been generating headlines for weeks. You are less likely to have heard of Cop16, the international summit on biodiversity. It wrapped up two days ago but has barely scraped the news agenda.
The lack of interest in Cop16 extended even to the participants. A whopping 80% of countries failed to submit plans for meeting a landmark UN nature agreement at the conference, as they had promised to do. Even Colombia, which hosted Cop16, missed the deadline. And, as the summit wore on, representatives noticed with mounting alarm a “lack of concrete progress” on any of the major targets they had set themselves.
