The 2024 United Nations Biodiversity Conference, better known as COP16, begins today in Cali, Colombia. There, delegates from almost 200 countries — or parties, as they are known in the COP process — will assess their progress on implementing the landmark Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) that was signed at the last summit in December 2022.
COP16 comes just weeks after the release of WWF's Living Planet Report 2024, which found a “catastrophic” 73% decline in the average size of monitored wildlife populations between 1970 and 2020.
