There have been a number of bumps in the road as the UN’s biodiversity conference draws to a close here in Cali. On a practical level, there’s the issue of the poor wifi in the conference centre. The traffic has been bad, with many Cop16 attendees spending an hour or so just getting to the venue each day.

But it has been much bigger than expected – initial estimations had been for about 15,000 attendees, but there have been closer to 23,000, making it the world’s biggest nature protection conference to date.

Spare a thought for the Ugandan delegates though, who found themselves checking into a sex motel – complete with “love machine” chairs, dance poles and mirrored ceilings – after their original accommodation was cancelled at the last minute. It is “very unusual” to put a mirror above your bed, one delegate told me. “I don’t know the motive behind that.”

There’s more from the conference below, after this week’s most important reads, including the latest on the deadly floods in Spain.

In terms of Cop16 negotiations, the biggest blockage is that the global north’s promise to cough up $20bn (£15.4bn) for the global south by 2025 does not appear to be materialising.

Monday was “finance day” but only $163m was pledged by eight countries, an amount that was described as “paltry” compared with what needs to be delivered. This is not because of an obsession with money in and of itself, but because of the structural transformations it can drive in the global economy. Money is central to enabling developing nations to fund protections for their globally important ecosystems.

It is the core issue that all other targets to save nature revolve around. Sound familiar? We’re seeing the same debates play out in regard to the climate crisis with the UN’s climate conference (Cop29) kicking off in a few weeks. Mark Opel, the finance lead at Campaign for Nature, describes financing as the “currency of trust”. He said: “It is fundamental to building trust between the global north and the global south.”

That $20bn figure is just one slice of the pie. The UN says the global nature finance gap is $700bn – the amount required to sustainably manage biodiversity and halt the destruction of ecosystems and species. This might seem like a very big number, but to put it in perspective, it is significantly less than the amount that the US spends on military funding each year.

Global spending on protected areas (national parks, etc) is the same as the amount spent on the global beard-grooming industry (estimated to be $24bn a year). People say they care about nature, but the amount of money we are prepared to part with to protect it says something else.

One part of plugging this huge gap would be the $20bn from wealthy nations. So far, the majority of rich countries appear to be contributing less than half of their “fair share” of biodiversity finance, according to a report released ahead of the UN meeting. The devil is in the detail, because it is not just about quantity – quality is equally important. There is no globally agreed definition of biodiversity finance. For example, a project to give food aid relating to the war in Ukraine was counted under biodiversity funding, Campaign for Nature reported.

Also on the table is the question of whether debt should count as finance. Nature funding in the form of loans has been on the rise. According to unpublished estimates from Campaign for Nature, about 80% of the increase in funding from 2021 to 2022 was in loans, not grants. France, for example, has given 87% of its biodiversity contributions as loans. Climate justice activists argue that this money should be given as grants to save poorer countries falling into a vicious circle of indebtedness. This is something many of them are arguing should be included in the text.

Until wealthy countries take the issue of finance seriously, developing nations are warning that limited headway can be made on other targets for nature (which we also are making slow progress on). It’s very easy to make nice pledges, but it seems no one is putting their money where their mouth is. “I think political prioritisation of nature is still too low,” said Brian O’Donnell, director of the Campaign for Nature.

Read more from Cop16:

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