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Environment

COP15: How much money do we need to stop biodiversity loss?

Several high-income countries have made pledges at COP15 to fund programmes to protect biodiversity but so far they amount to a small fraction of what’s needed

By James Dinneen

16 December 2022

COP15 delegates negotiating on 7 December in Montreal

COP15 delegates negotiating in Montreal, Canada

Photo by IISD/ENB Mike Muzurakis

A group of high-income countries, including the US, UK and Australia, have pledged to spend more than $10 billion a year for programmes to protect biodiversity, effectively doubling the amount of such funding over the next several years. These pledges are crucial to the agreements being hammered out at the COP15 biodiversity summit in Canada, but they only scratch the surface of what is needed to halt and reverse biodiversity loss.

It is unclear how much of these pledges represent new spending, says Andrew Deutz at The Nature…

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