Concita Sõpré speaks with calm. She enunciates each syllable of her Portuguese and waits patiently for a translation to English. She is seated on stage at a table in a noisy room where heads of state, representatives from non-governmental organizations, and community leaders from around the world are speaking to the press, hoping to be heard. The cacophony of voices seeping in from outside the room make it hard for those seated furthest away to understand her. But she has plenty to tell these distant ears: “We preserve for those yet to come. For my grandchildren, my great-grandchildren. That is why this forest exists. That is why clean water and animals still exist,” she says. “What part of what we’re saying does the world still not understand?” she asks.

Concita sees firsthand how life’s time is not bureaucratic time. She is in Cali, Colombia, taking part in events at the COP-16, the UN Biodiversity Conference, where leaders from around the globe are discussing how to save the Nature their very societies have destroyed.

Two years ago, at the COP-15 meeting in Canada, the agreement struck by the nations, the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, was lauded as ambitious. They planned to raise the world’s preserved land area from 17% to 30% and water and sea areas from 10% to 30%. They would additionally restore 30% of already degraded areas. To do this, developed countries would contribute US$ 20 billion a year by 2025.

In 2022, there were eight years left for countries to finalize the plan. Now they have six. At this COP-16 meeting, referred to as the “implementation COP” behind the scenes, they are supposed to show their progress and align on the details for reaching this goal, but there has been hardly any movement. Most of them have yet to introduce even one action plan to reach the targets, as agreed two years earlier. And just 2% of the preservation money owed by developed countries has been guaranteed so far. The COP meeting in Cali did manage to bring in more civic participation – there were a record number of delegations and side events with Indigenous communities, Afro-descendants, and civil society organizations, which ensured bigger gains in the final text. Yet no advances were made on the main issue: guaranteeing money to keep the forest standing. It was a wasted opportunity on the road from Cali to Belém, the pair of conferences in Amazonian countries that will include a Climate COP meeting in Pará in 2025, while also raising major expectations for the forest.

Never has so much life been lost and, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, a group of over 150 scientists, 75% of the Earth has already changed due to human action. Reducing devastation and letting the forest grow are two fundamental fronts in tackling the climate crisis. The Amazon, Pantanal and Cerrado are on fire. Droughts have made dozens of rivers into deserts. Violent flooding ravaged Porto Alegre months ago. During the COP-16, floods killed over 200 people in Spain.

Concita experiences this urgency and that is why she is in a hurry. An Indigenous Gavião woman, from August to September she fought a fire that burned over 10% of her territory, the Mãe Maria Indigenous Territory, located in the state of Pará, in the Amazon Rainforest. Along with the flames, another four infrastructure projects cross the place where her ancestors lived in “Peace with Nature,” the theme of this COP-16: a railway, a highway, and two power transmission networks (one for homes and another for industries). Deforestation removed the strip of trees that held back some of the wind that now topples centuries-old chestnut trees.

The world being experienced in the COP’s air conditioned rooms does not have the same read on the urgency. During the event’s two weeks, the countries’ negotiators spent hours polishing the text of the agreements. They went over them page by page. Word by word. Even periods were scrutinized. A comma out of place could turn into a diplomatic incident and could bother the businesses and pharmaceutical companies lobbying outside. A matter seemed to move forward, but then some country would place brackets around the text – the punctuation used at the COPs to indicate disagreement. Because agreements are only made when there is consensus among all nations in attendance, putting brackets around a topic can be used to successfully bargain for a different issue: “I’ll give you this, if you give me that.” An afternoon there seems to draw on for weeks. No one seems to be in any hurry.

Or almost no one.

Viviana Figueroa is an Indigenous Omaguaca woman from Argentina. She is a global technical coordinator at the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, the agency recognized by the Convention on Biological Diversity as the official representative of Indigenous and traditional communities in negotiations. The Biodiversity COP, held every two years, is the space where nations discuss and decide how to implement the convention that was agreed to in 1992 and lauded at the time as being quite progressive, since it included an understanding that talking about Nature is impossible if there is no active participation from Indigenous peoples. So the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity was created as a working group where Indigenous and local peoples discuss and assess whether the Convention is on the right track. The group speaks at negotiations, although it makes no direct decisions.

Viviana is seated at a table with country representatives. She is paying close attention to the commas and the brackets. And to the politics between the lines.

On the fourth day, in hushed tones, she calls over Lakpa Nuri Sherpa, an Indigenous man from Nepal and the co-president of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity. She asks him to schedule a side talk with a particular country’s representatives. The nation, which Viviana can’t name publicly for diplomatic reasons, was holding up negotiations and nobody knew why. The Indigenous peoples started an important movement at this COP-16. They proposed their group be given higher status. If they were to become what in diplomatic jargon is called a “subsidiary body” (an official group providing assistance on all points in the treaty), then in practice, they would have more visibility and power to bring the traditional communities’ standpoint to official documents. They would also have more technical help. And they would go down as the first Indigenous subsidiary body in the history of UN conventions – the first direct civic impact on the countries’ decisions.

“Biodiversity is on our lands and territories and any decision the convention makes impacts us positively or negatively. We would rather emerging decisions be a tool to recognize Indigenous peoples’ knowledge, promote their participation in decision-making processes, [and] establish processes that support what the Indigenous peoples are doing, which is conserving biodiversity,” Viviana explains.

In addition to the subsidiary body, the Indigenous people had other expectations for this COP-16. One was to ensure that companies pay for profiting off plants extracted from the forest – the digital sequence information obtained from living organisms – and that part of this money compensates traditional peoples, the frequent source of ancient knowledge used to make drugs and cosmetics. They would also like some of the fund stipulated in the COP-15 agreement – the US$ 20 billion a year from developed countries – to be disbursed to Indigenous communities without intermediation from governments, whose priorities often differ from those of the people living in these territories.

Ty’e Parakanã, a leader in the Apyterewa Indigenous Territory, attended COP-16 to share his thoughts on how the money should be spent. He left his home-territory in the Amazon Rainforest, in Pará, where heat is cooled by the river. He took a car, then a bus and four airplanes to participate in some of the official program’s side events – of which there were hundreds – and to tell whoever would listen that those who destroyed must pay. “The people who gave the farmer financing to destroy our territory have to help us reforest, because they left us nothing but destruction,” he says. “Our territory has no more trees, just pastures.”

Ty’e is 37. But he only lived at “Peace with Nature” until he was 7.

Thirty years ago, he watched as his land was ransacked, the trees where he played were felled, the river where he bathed was polluted. His territory became pastureland and cocoa monocrops took the place of the chestnut trees. The Apyterewa Indigenous Territory became the most deforested in Brazil. Along with Ty’e’s human relatives, there are 140 species of mammals, 121 of trees, 473 of birds, 75 of amphibians, and 139 of reptiles living there – this data comes from a platform created by a pilot project for a new Tropical Ecology Center, incubated at the Serrapilheira Institute, which is not yet public.

Ty’e had to leave his village when the federal government began an operation to remove the invaders last year. It was the only safe solution. In the end, the houses, including his own, were burned down in revenge. It is a War against Nature, financed by banks and investment funds, as reported by the Global Witness organization in September of this year.

The economy that destroys biodiversity keeps growing year after year, despite the efforts of UN agreements, says a report from the United Nations Environment Programme released at last year’s Climate COP. According to the study, the public and private sectors invest around US$ 7 trillion worldwide each year in activities that negatively impact Nature, equal to 7% of the world’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

Lots of people profit from the destruction, which is why discussions are so lengthy. The COP is not just what happens inside the COP. It is often necessary to take a close look around it to try to understand the pressures calling for the brackets inside. Lots of people want to keep profiting – from reconstruction now too.

On the fifteenth floor of a five-star hotel in Cali’s upscale San Antonio neighborhood, a group of people in business casual attire watched as a panel was announced on a big screen, another side event to the official program. The title appeared in one corner of the slide: Opportunities blossom: How business can profit from nature’s revival. In the other corner was a picture of a cute cotton-top tamarin, a rainforest monkey who lives in tall trees that are increasingly scarce because of deforestation.

Another slide offers a tip to those attending. “How to start with Nature? 1. Identify the lowest-hanging fruit in any sector [fruit is a metaphor here]; 2. Find the biggest impact; 3. Reconsider existing solutions; 4. Apply new technologies and practices.” Speakers included Bayer’s head of sustainability and strategic engagement, Natasha Santos. In January of this year, US courts for a fourth time ordered Bayer, which in 2018 purchased agrochemical giant Monsanto, to indemnify farmers who developed cancer after using the company’s Roundup herbicide. This glyphosate-based agrochemical, which was found in a study by Princeton University, Fundação Getúlio Vargas and Insper to be responsible for the deaths of 503 children a year in the soybean fields of Brazil’s south and center-west regions. This is according to a report by the BBC, in which Bayer contests the study’s reliability to the outlet and claims the safety of its products is the company’s top priority, while also denying that glyphosate causes cancer.

Natasha was invited to the event in Cali to talk about innovation. She discussed climate-resistant seeds, like tomatoes that could grow in the desert. When someone in the audience asked if there are any plans to eliminate highly environmentally-toxic glyphosate from the company’s portfolio, she said no. “We still see the need for chemicals in agriculture over the next decade, because there are pests that can’t be controlled any other way,” she responded.

The panel was one of the 26 events organized in Cali during the COP-16 by the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures. On its website, the group explains that: “Society, business and finance depend on nature’s assets and the services they provide. The acceleration of nature loss globally is eroding the ability of nature to provide these vital services. Taking action to conserve and restore nature is now a critical global priority.” The “Nature” they mention four times in this short paragraph is a source of earnings that could now dry up. Hence the need to act. It’s capitalism being capitalism: fix the problem and profit from the solution.

The Kunming-Montreal Framework signed at the COP-15 has 23 action-oriented targets for countries. Number 15 is aimed at businesses. It encourages the agreement’s signatory nations to take “legal, administrative or policy measures” to guarantee that large companies and financial institutions monitor, assess and transparently disclose their risks. According to the target, the idea is to progressively reduce the negative impacts businesses have on biodiversity.

At some point the countries may have to implement this rule and hold companies and banks accountable – the same ones now helping to destroy areas like Ty’e’s. At the COP-15, the UN agreement officially adopted the indicator used by the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures to assess compliance. One year later, non-governmental organizations are saying the metric being used falls short, as it fails to require that companies share important information, such as court proceedings on environmental violations where they are named. “The baseline of the [Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures] is to report on how Nature impacts the business, and not on how the business impacts Nature,” says Shona Hawkes, of the Rainforest Action Network. The Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures did not respond to an email request for comment.

Over 500 businesses have already adopted the initiative. These include Vale, which was responsible for two dam failures in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais that destroyed rivers and cities, killing people, trees and animals, and which also seized 24,000 hectares of public lands in Carajás, Pará, to build the world’s largest iron ore project – Vale denies the areas were public.

Letícia Guimarães, a Vale analyst for “Nature-based solutions,” was one of the speakers at the task force’s first event in Cali, held at the same five-star hotel. A protest awaited her. “It’s very hard for us to live in our territory without water. Because on November 5, 2015, one of the biggest crimes in the state of Minas Gerais happened (…) which killed kilometers of fresh river water, species of fish. It took away our method of spiritual contact with the water,” Shirley Krenak, one of the protestors, said before an audience of executives, referring to a dam in the city of Mariana that burst.

“We, Indigenous people, are not against progress. We are against progress that kills, that destroys biodiversity. And no matter how much you all meet here to find economic solutions within the capitalist system, these solutions are not good. You are killing people and killing biodiversity,” she added. “The end of the world doesn’t exist. The end of humanity does,” she warned.

On the eve of the COP-16’s final plenary session, nobody quite knew what the legacy of these two weeks of talks would be. The big issues were stuck between brackets, including a proposal from Brazil and Colombia to add Afro-descendants to the group of “Indigenous peoples and local communities,” a way to recognize the role of the children and grandchildren of people enslaved by colonization in conserving Nature. Yet the European Union, home of the colonizers, saw fit to add some brackets. It was accused of trying to use the paragraph as a bargaining chip.

Viviana and the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity were also distressed by a roadblock to approval of the Indigenous subsidiary body. They organized a protest to pressure the countries – some were arguing the new body would raise costs.

Brazilian activist Txai Suruí was detained, assaulted and sent to a little room by event police for deciding to hold a protest to ask for demarcation of Indigenous territories, the most logical method of preservation. Her protest did not have authorization – and only authorized protests are allowed. After intercession by Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, the COP apologized and released Txai.

Shirley Krenak took part in the third protest to remind people that companies like Vale should be held responsible for their crimes and that they can’t hide behind sustainability reports.

Pharmaceutical companies were winning the fight against being forced to give some of the profits they make from the forest.

Developed countries were battling developing nations because they didn’t want to create a new fund to deposit the US$ 20 billion they owed – Global South nations, especially in Africa, complained that the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, which manages the current fund, favors the voices of wealthier countries.

While things were heating up outside, inside the negotiation rooms was a clash: the COP-16 was heading toward failure and it was finally necessary to pick up the pace. Countries held more side talks, they yielded to bargaining on brackets, they closed their eyes to dubious words meant to appease pharmaceutical companies. And something finally progressed. A whole other night of work and a final 12-hour plenary session that ended at nine o’clock the next morning because the meeting lacked a quorum to continue.

The Indigenous people achieved the biggest wins: the new subsidiary body was approved. The “Cali Fund” was also created, where industries using Nature’s genetics for drugs and cosmetics can deposit some of their earnings – half of the fund will go to Indigenous people and local communities, but company deposits will be voluntary.

Afro-descendants were also included in the text.

However, the impasse between the North and Global South countries thwarted the creation of the new biodiversity fund developing countries had requested – this discussion will need to move forward at an inter-COP meeting being held in 2025, in Thailand. Or at the COP-17, in Armenia. Or at the COP-18, somewhere else in the world. These meetings are in addition to the Climate COPs – this year’s meeting was in Azerbaijan; and next year’s is in Belém – where more hours of talks are expected in the world of brackets.

The real world will likely be even hotter and more unstable.

Concita returned home, where she is afraid of once again having to face the fire. Ty’e is now with his relatives, building their new village, in the hope that the invaders selling cattle to multinationals do not come back and torch it. Shirley went back to her murdered river. How much longer will they have to defend biodiversity with their bodies?

They need humanity to choose to finally listen to them. There is still time, but it could soon be too late.

COP-16 coverage by SUMAÚMA is done in partnership with Global Witness (@global_witness), an international organization working since 1993 to investigate, expose, and create campaigns against environmental and human rights abuses around the world.