international environmental meetings expected by the end of 2024

Biodiversity COP16 in Colombia

Biodiversity COP16 – officially the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity – will take place from 21 October to 1 November in Cali, Colombia.

A follow-up meeting more than a discovery, to see how the historic commitments made at COP15 in Montreal two years ago are being realized – COPs dedicated to biodiversity are held on a biennial basis. The latter concluded with an ambitious agreement, which called for the protection of 30% of land and seas by 2030.

Countries will need to take stock of the implementation of this new framework and propose national strategies that are consistent with it.

Observers are hoping for a leadership role from the host country. WWF praised Colombia's “leadership” in international negotiations, “which is home to nearly 10% of the planet's biodiversity.”

Climate COP29 in Baku

Climate COP29 will be held from November 11-22 in Baku, Azerbaijan, a hydrocarbon exporting country. While the Dubai edition a year earlier, the largest ever COP in terms of attendance, focused on the transition away from fossil fuels, money will dominate the debate this time.

The meeting must conclude with a new objective for climate finance (called the “New Quantified Collective Objective”, also known by its English acronym “NCQG”). It will replace the one established in 2009, which called for rich countries to provide $100 billion in annual aid to developing countries, a figure painfully reached in 2022.

“COP29 represents an opportunity to unlock more climate investment from a wider range of sources, public and private, and to improve the quality of this financing,” believes the World Resources Institute (WRI), an American think tank. Problem: There is currently no consensus on the amount or destination of funds or taxpayers. And the outcome of the American elections, just before COP29, will certainly weigh on the debates.

Home straight for the plastic treaty?

The fifth and final session of international negotiations to hopefully put in stone a first global treaty to combat the scourge of plastic (INC-5) is scheduled for November 25 to December 1 in Busan, South Korea.

Delegations from 175 countries agreed in 2022 to finalize such a treaty by the end of 2024. But divisions remain, particularly between nations that want ambitious limits on plastic production and some producing countries that prefer to improve recycling.

Hellen Kahaso Dena, head of Greenpeace's Pan-African Plastics Project, hopes countries “will agree on a treaty that prioritizes reducing plastic production.”

Desertification COP16 in Riyadh

The 16th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (COP16) is scheduled to take place in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia from 2-13 December.

This COP is set to mark “a crucial turning point” with the hope of a “consensus on how to strengthen resilience to drought and how to accelerate the recovery of degraded land,” notes Arona Diedhiou, research director at the Development Research Institute . (IRD) stationed at Houphouët Boigny University in Côte d'Ivoire.

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