The Finnish delegation at the meeting was led by the Minister of Environment and Climate Kai Mykkänen (chairman).
The UN COP16 nature conference organized in Cali, Colombia has stretched into overtime for several hours in its final stages. The final session of the meeting was supposed to start at six in the evening local time on Friday, i.e. one in the morning Finnish time on Saturday, but according to the news agency AFP, this has been delayed by several hours.
Instead, the negotiators had retreated in smaller groups behind closed doors to resolve their differences. The purpose of the nature meeting has been to evaluate and strive to promote nature conservation plans and to collect funding in order to achieve the goals set at the 2022 UN nature meeting.
Discussions about financing have mainly focused on what kind of financing mechanisms would be used to advance the goals. The two-week meeting started on Monday of last week.
“The package is pretty messed up”
The Finnish delegation at the meeting was led by the Minister of Environment and Climate Kai Mykkänen (collect.). On Friday evening Finnish time, the discussions were at a difficult stage, Mykkänen told STT by phone from the spot.
– There is an opportunity to make purposeful history here, but it’s really still pretty messed up here. It is also quite possible that this will end with a very poor result, which mainly then leaves everything for the next meetings.
According to Mykkänen, the difficult issues include funding, as in previous meetings. The majority of the Global South strives to build a new instrument for channeling funding from Western countries, because the existing ones are considered too rigid.
– From our point of view, it is not possible to add to the confusion of funds. Establishing new, separate funds again, when there is not enough money for the old ones, is not a solution. State funding from Western countries cannot be the solution to everything, Mykkänen said.