COP16 Live Updates: President Petro and Antonio Gutérres address high-level plenary at biodiversity conference

Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo will present the Global Coalition for Peace with Nature at the COP16 plenary. He will explain the scope of the proposal, which aims to gain the of delegations meeting in Cali.

Guterres arrived at the Pacific Valley Events Centre to attend the plenary meeting. He was accompanied on his arrival by Astrid Schomaker, Executive Secretary of the CBD.

In the Atrato Room, the ambassadors of the different countries represented in Colombia met before the plenary session. The Chinese ambassador, Zhu Jingyang, was present. Other ambassadors were also present in the Zona Azul, including the Italian ambassador, Giancarlo Maria Curcio.

Armenian President Vahagn Khachaturyan was greeted at the entrance to the Pacific Valley Events Centre by Foreign Minister Luis Gilberto Murillo.

In the midst of Ecuador's energy crisis, with power cuts lasting up to 14 hours, President Daniel Noboa has travelled to Cali for COP16. After the plenary, he will meet with President Gustavo Petro.

The President also arrived at the Valle del Pacífico Events Centre for the COP16 plenary, which will be attended by UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

What we are experiencing is worse than the apocalypse," said the President in the opening moments of his address to the COP16 plenary.

This is the biodiversity capital of the world,' said President Petro at COP16 in Cali. We are dealing with the very life of humanity in the midst of a time of extinction (...) We must bring democracy to the decisions; bureaucratic mediation has only one purpose, which is to allow the interests of greed to prevail over the voices of humanity.

COP16 and COP30 in Belém (Brazil) must be decisive, turning points where we do not continue with business as usual. Who thinks that a problem of the magnitude of the climate crisis can be solved with the same old methods," said the President.

"What happened to the oil money (...) Where did it go when it was consumed by the big factories of greed? When oil and coal go into the atmosphere, we die. The factory of greed builds not the wealth of the world, not stability, but our death. And the other part of the oil becomes dollars and euros.

"The most dangerous countries in the world are those that emit the most CO2 (carbon dioxide), the rich countries. (...) They are the ones who are killing us, they are the ones who do not want us to enter their borders, after they have dried up the rivers, after they have left infertile lands, after they have finished with basic food, after they have finished with living conditions, because they have sucked them into the atmosphere through their CO2 emissions, causing climate collapse," he added.

Hopefully COP16 will be a turning point, because we deliberately wanted this COP16 not to be a meeting in a high snowy mountain, isolated from humanity, but to feel the flesh, the warmth, the generosity, the spirit of joy of a Pacific region like Cali (...) We wanted the people to take over the COP,' he told the plenary in front of hundreds of participants.

Nature is life, and yet we are waging war on it (...) Every day we see temperatures rising, species being lost, every minute we dump a truckload of rubbish into our oceans, rivers and lakes. Make no mistake, this is what an existential crisis looks like," Guterres said.

Peace with nature means making peace with those who protect it. We must defend those who defend nature,' Guterres said, referring to the environmental leaders who have been killed around the world.

Our mission in Cali is clear: to know how to accelerate the process in favour of biodiversity, to mobilise the necessary resources and to strengthen the role of indigenous, afro-descendant and local peoples (...) We must choose life. Let's make peace with nature,' concluded Guerres.

Chancellor Luis Gilberto Murillo addressed the plenary: "Humanity has reached a turning point where decisions can no longer be made only in of how to undo the damage, but how to build the future from today".

"Colombia has presented the Global Initiative for Peace with Nature as an opportunity to build a common strategy to address the climate crisis and biodiversity loss. It seeks to take care of ecosystems and to accelerate the transition to a new green and decarbonised economy," said the Foreign Minister.

Daniel Noboa, President of Ecuador, gave a short speech to the plenary: "We have many natural resources, but we have forgotten people, we have forgotten humanity (...) I want to believe that change is possible and that the world will not end. It all depends on whether we value human life, whether we value humanity, whether we take the right decisions to change and give our children and grandchildren a better future".

The presidents of Armenia, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti and Suriname and ministers from El Salvador, Bolivia and Venezuela addressed the plenary to present their positions on biodiversity, actions taken in their countries and plans to be adopted at COP16.