At the start of the high-level segment of COP16, world leaders called for 'peace with nature'

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The high-level segment is the start of the final phase of environmental summits, where ministers, dignitaries and heads of state arrive to seal the pacts and agreements the world has signed. This year's COP on Biodiversity, hosted by Colombia, was attended by five foreign ministers, 114 ministers, 33 vice-ministers and 25 high-level representatives, as well as 81 organisations, agencies and NGOs from 150 countries. This represents 76% of the of the Convention on Biological Diversity.

They all heard, in different languages and from the voice of the UN Secretary-General and six heads of state - including President Gustavo Petro - an urgent call for action and resources, the same as that repeated in Cali in recent days, but with the addition of a call for a global pact to make "peace with nature". The concept, not new to UN plenaries and rooms, but adopted as a slogan at this summit, has now become a global coalition that millions of people are trying to .

In this sense, President Gustavo Petro was the first to intervene, with a long speech in which he spoke not only of the central theme, which was the call to make peace with nature, but also of what this implied, including, in his concept, the reduction of the consumption of fossil fuels and the economic model that he linked to the overexploitation of the planet's resources. "When I repeat over and over again that we are beginning the time of human extinction, I believe I am not exaggerating, it is not an apocalyptic vision, although what we are living is worse than the apocalypse," the president said.

Petro also called for a change in the methods used in recent years to tackle a crisis that will not wait and that affects the most disadvantaged populations. "The COP16 in Cali and the COP30 in Belén de Pará (Brazil) must be definitive turning points, where we do not go on doing the same thing. Who believes that a problem of the magnitude of the climate crisis, which is the pollution of the entire planetary atmosphere by the factories of greed, can be solved with the same methods as always?

In this regard, the former minister and former director of the Centre for Sustainable Development Goals, Alejandro Gaviria, assured that these words of President Gustavo Petro are a response to a speech that has been repeated many times, and that it is the same one that he repeated a year ago at Stanford University, in the United States, and a month ago at the Autonomous University of Mexico.

"It is a speech that we have seen in other areas and that I have tried to summarise in one phrase, with the President's vision, that you could almost summarise in a kind of equation and that is 'capitalism equals death'. And behind this discourse there is an idea, a political idea, we could say, that the dismantling of capitalism and our dominant forms of production and consumption is the key to saving the planet. I believe, without making ideological categorisations, that it is a speech that sums up the president's vision, known in the academic world as ecosocialism," said Gaviria.

For his part, the president of the Andi pointed out that the president's words were true in substance, if "abrupt" in form. "I would say that, as usual, he said many things that are true, although perhaps the way he says them is a little abrupt, to say the least. But what I would say is that what is really important is to come up with solutions that are effective, that are inclusive, and not to end up polarising more. Polarisation is not going to be an option to build a strategy that allows the planet to generate greater sustainability," Mac Master stressed.

From a business perspective, what is needed is "a great global cause that we all feel in our hearts that if we do not act quickly, we are heading for a catastrophe, not a crisis, but a catastrophe. If we are aware of that, humanity will be able to come up with better alternatives and strategies than we have today," Mac Master added.

Opening the plenary session on Tuesday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a powerful speech in which he described the global environmental crisis as a "war on nature", stressed the urgent need to restore harmony with our planet, and urged countries to present clear plans for aligning with global conservation goals and encouraging the mobilisation of financial resources, not only from public sources but also from the private sector.

"Nature is life. Yet we are waging a war against it. A war in which there can be no winners. Every year we see temperatures rise higher and higher. Every day we lose more species. Every minute we dump a truckload of plastic waste into our oceans, rivers and lakes. Make no mistake. This is what an existential crisis looks like. No country, rich or poor, is immune to the ravages of climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation and pollution. These environmental crises are interconnected. They know no borders," Guterres said.

Although in the end there were not as many heads of state as had been announced - at least 14 had been expected - the High Level Segment began with the voices of the six heads of state who were present, and each of them, in their own language and words, called for the same thing as the President and the Secretary-General: a global movement that can put the relationship with nature at the centre of the world's agenda in a positive way.

The voices of the President of Armenia, Vahagn Khachaturyan; the President of Ecuador, Daniel Noboa; the President of Guinea Bissau, Úmaro Sissoco Embaló; the President of the Interim Presidential Council of the Republic of Haiti, Leslie Voltaire; the President of Suriname, Chan Satokhi; the Vice-President of Bolivia, David Choquehuanca; the Minister of Foreign Affairs of El Salvador, Alexandra Hill Tinoco; and the Minister of Popular Power for Foreign Affairs of Venezuela, Yvan Gil.

Speaking to this large group and more than a thousand people in the Amazonia Hall, Muhamad added that the aim of COP16 was to put the conservation of nature and the fight against the triple planetary crisis in the spotlight and to mobilise the world around the actions that are urgently needed but not being taken today.

EDWIN CAICEDO

Environment and Health Journalist

@CaicedoUcros