COP16 Rome Talks Resume With Biodiversity Finance and Monitoring Framework Unresolved

As COP16 negotiations resume in Rome following an inconclusive summit in Cali, CDP is calling for stronger transparency commitments to ensure accountability under the Global Biodiversity Framework signed by 196 countries in 2022. The three-day Rome session must resolve outstanding issues including a global biodiversity finance mechanism and the adoption of a monitoring framework.

The Global Biodiversity Framework includes 23 targets that require robust monitoring to assess progress. CDP has already analysed corporate and subnational progress against targets 10, 12 and 15 using its disclosure dataset, which in 2024 covered over 24,800 companies and nearly 1,000 cities, states and regions representing over 66 percent of global market capitalisation. Companies disclosing on all three issues — climate, forests and water — increased by 122 percent between 2023 and 2024. The first round of national and global reporting under the GBF is due in 2026, adding urgency to the agreement of a monitoring framework in Rome.

CDP research finds that cities are planning for sustainability goals over the long term but missing near-term urgency: only 16 percent of city nature actions are planned for 2025, while 34 percent are planned for after 2050. On corporate disclosure, only 57 percent of water-related risks and 54 percent of forest-related risks disclosed through CDP in 2023 were accompanied by a financial impact value, revealing substantial gaps in companies' ability to quantify the material financial consequences of nature loss. These gaps are directly relevant to India, where biodiversity-linked risks in sectors including agriculture, mining and coastal infrastructure are material but largely unquantified.

CDP calls on governments arriving in Rome to commit to mandatory biodiversity disclosure requirements for companies and financial institutions as a foundation for GBF implementation. Transparency is described as a prerequisite for identifying and addressing challenges in meeting the framework's 2030 targets. CDP's Senior Manager for Nature Frederik Buchholz and Global Policy Manager Bianca Barilla argue that data from CDP's platform — the world's largest environmental database — should be directly employed by governments to track GBF progress and guide investment toward nature-positive activities.

Key figure — 122% increase in companies disclosing on climate, forests and water simultaneously between 2023 and 2024