Representatives of business and industry groups more than doubled at the UN’s latest biodiversity summit, DeSmog has found, sparking fears over the growing influence of powerful private sector bodies.

Despite some important breakthroughs, talks at this year’s COP16 summit in Cali, Colombia – which aimed to reverse the drastic global decline in plant and animal life – ended in disarray on 2 November, with Greenpeace’s An Lambrechts complaining that progress to protect the world’s dangerously depleted ecosystems had stalled after “unprecedented corporate lobbying”.  

DeSmog’s analysis shows that business attendees at this year’s biodiversity COP reached record levels, more than doubling compared to the previous summit two years ago, to reach a total of 1,261 delegates.

The rise in industry delegates was proportionally higher than the increase in overall attendees, which rose by 46 percent. Banks were the best-represented sector with 124 delegates, which included more than half of the 30 banks named as the biggest financiers of deforestation in an October report. They were followed by fossil fuel companies, which brought 40 representatives.

The talks also saw a significant increase in big food and agriculture firms – such as Nestle, Pepsico and Cargill – which brought 33 delegates, nearly double the number from COP15.  

The presence of agrochemical and seed companies was up, too. Their delegates increased by 40 percent and 24 percent respectively since COP15. Representatives also came to COP16 from the pharmaceutical sector – which openly opposed a tax on accessing nature’s genetic code.  

Agro-chemical and biotechnology groups – such as Syngenta, BASF and their lobby group Croplife – enjoyed privileged access to negotiations in Colombia, coming in as part of country delegations with Brazil, Mexico, Switzerland and Canada. 

DeSmog’s data also revealed growing interest in biodiversity protection from big tech companies – such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft – which see an opportunity in the vast volumes of data which may be required to measure and protect nature set aside for preservation.

The delegates brought by some companies dwarfed country delegations from the Global South, which is home to the majority of the best-preserved natural world. For example, German multinational Bayer brought 12 delegates, triple that of the highly biodiverse East African country of Ethiopia, which brought only four.

A map of business participation at COP16 by DeSmog revealed in October that powerful industry associations and multinationals – from the agriculture, pharmaceuticals, finance, mining, and fossil fuels sectors – had many routes into influencing the outcomes of the two week summit. Many of these companies are actively depleting the natural world and have lobbied hard – and with success – against any regulations that would force a change to their business model.

Ioannis Agapakis, a lawyer in the wildlife and habitats programme for the law firm ClientEarth felt the business presence to be much more significant than in previous years.

“What you see here are two COPs,” he said. “One where powerful interests have arrived to talk about how to legitimise destruction they are causing; and another where the Indigenous representatives are talking about the great human rights violations, and biodiversity destruction they are facing as a result.”

The UN said it was important to bring private interests to the negotiating table. “This is the greatest representation of business at a CBD COP,” David Ainsworth, head of communications for the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity told The Guardian, which has reported on DeSmog’s findings. “The increased presence of any groups to our meeting demonstrates the growing awareness of the importance of the biodiversity agenda,” he said.

Pesticide and Biotech Lobby 

Brazil, Canada, Mexico and Switzerland all brought companies and lobby groups as members of their country delegations – lending pesticides and biotechnology representatives direct access to negotiations.

The highest number of company delegates, including two members of the powerful pesticides trade group Croplife, came with Brazil, along with eight members of the country’s national trade association for biotechnology, DeSmog’s analysis found. 

Canada also brought in a delegate from CropLife, two representatives of pesticide company BASF arrived with Mexico, and pesticide and seed company Syngenta showed up with Switzerland.

Overall, companies and trade bodies representing the pesticides, biotech and pharmaceutical sectors rose 20 percent. This was in a year that saw a major push to agree to a levy that would be placed on companies for the use of genetic data, known as Digital Sequence Information on Genetic Resources (known as DSI) at the talks.

The genetic code of the world’s flora and fauna is currently used to develop a host of commercial products – everything from groundbreaking medicines, to ingredients for detergents – but companies are only asked to make voluntary donations for its use.

Negotiators at COP16 made important strides towards mandating the sharing of profits from these discoveries with communities where this genetic code is found. It was agreed that large companies using DSI should contribute a one percent tax on profits (or 0.1 percent of revenue), with income channeled to a newly created “Cali fund”, which expects to raise $1 billion for conservation efforts and Indigenous communities.

Delays and Loopholes

Despite these advances, campaigners say the agreement secured at the summit contained several loopholes which may undermine its effectiveness – chief among them that payment of the levy is still voluntary. Discussions on DSI will continue next year, including defining whether the tax applies to profits or revenue, with the latter supposing a much higher fundraising potential. 

“If the digital sequence fund grows to a larger percentage point and corporations are truly held accountable, it will be a game changer,” Glenn Peters from Greenpeace Asia Pacific said. 

He added it was critical that negotiations were free from “intense industry pressure” in future. “Such antagonistic corporate lobbying has no place at UN nature talks”, he said.

Observers also told DeSmog that lobbying by pesticide group Croplife had blocked an agreement on the COP16 “monitoring framework”, the set of metrics that will be used to measure the success of efforts to protect biodiversity.

Jago Wadley from Pesticides Action Network UK said the trade group worked to block a metric for cumulative pesticides toxicity. According to Wadley, this kept agreement on the monitoring framework elusive until the final moments of the summit, when discussions were ended because of a lack of quorum.

“Pesticide companies attend biodiversity COPs to protect their profits and will do all they can to undermine any efforts by governments to agree meaningful reforms,” Wadley said. “Their presence seriously hampers progress and crowds out the voices of independent scientists, affected communities and companies offering more sustainable solutions.” 

A spokesperson from Croplife said: “The private sector holds a crucial role and responsibility in the implementation of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, working to create and deploy scalable, sustainable agriculture solutions that preserve biodiversity, mitigate climate impact and provide enough food to those who need it.”

A spokesperson from pesticide firm BASF said: “We believe that biodiversity is best safeguarded through joint efforts. With specific regards to the biodiversity COP, we consider ourselves as one of the parties and want to play our part in creating a balanced agricultural system that minimizes the impact on biodiversity while efficiently producing high-quality food and crops.”

Big Banks Descend 

The finance sector had the largest presence of any business sector at the summit in Cali. Overall, 124 representatives from the banking industry attended, including the largest U.S. bank JP Morgan, which brought ten delegates, four from the UK’s HSBC, and three from the Netherland’s’ Rabobank, a major investor in industrial farming.

JP Morgan – the world’s largest backer of the oil, gas and coal industry, according to the campaign group Rainforest Action Network – was among a number of institutions who this year attended the biodiversity COP for the first time, as powerful finance players sought to “monetize biodiversity”, often through creating new markets for biodiversity offsets, or green financing products.

Martyna Domniak from advocacy group Stand.Earth questioned the presence at the summit of financial institutions that actively invest in companies that drive biodiversity loss. Six private banks that were identified in a recent report by Stand.Earth as being the leading funders of oil and gas development in the Amazon were all at COP16.

“Financial institutions at the summit are talking about ‘nature positive solutions’ but none of them mention the actual solution: to stop financing the drivers of deforestation and stop financing fossil fuels,” said Stand.Earth campaigner Martyna Domniak.

Dominiak commented that she had observed Santander “talking about changing the narrative, system change and changing the economy” at COP16. “Of course I agree with that but the same bank that is saying it is actually one of the biggest fossil fuel financiers in Europe and the biggest financier in Europe of beef, soy and other major deforestation drivers,” she said. “There’s a lot of hypocrisy in that.”

Frederic Hache from the Green Finance Observatory said COP16’s wrangling over how to raise the money needed by governments in the Global South to protect nature – an estimated $700 billion per year– may end up benefiting the finance industry, and those sectors most responsible for ecological damage.

In particular, the idea of a biodiversity “finance gap” positions private finance to have a larger role and has moved discussion away from addressing the root causes of nature destruction. Hache pointed to the need for re-direction of the $500 billion in public subsidies to damaging industries such as fossil fuels and industrial agriculture – a subject that barely got aired in Cali, despite being agreed in principle at the previous summit.

A Santander spokesperson said: “Our financing decisions adhere to a strict policy framework which aligns with all relevant environmental regulation. We conduct additional due diligence on all lending decisions subject to our policy which could impact biodiversity, and are actively involved in several industry initiatives to protect the environment. We also work proactively with clients, as well as other banks, governments, regulators and other institutions to help improve practices, recognising this is a highly complex challenge that requires a multifaceted, multi-lateral response.”

Big Tech Moves In

DeSmog’s analysis of delegates also reveals a new and growing interest from Big Tech companies, which are keen to get involved in biodiversity protection, a field with potential for vast amounts of data to be monitored, logged and stored.

DeSmog found 11 representatives from the ten largest software companies in attendance this year. They included three staff from Google, six from Microsoft and two from Amazon, the world’s largest cloud services provider. Nine representatives of Bezos Earth Fund, a technology-focused foundation run by the founder of Amazon, also attended the biodiversity summit.

The Convention on Biological Diversity’s headline goals – to protect 30 percent of the world’s land and oceans – will likely involve a high level of precise data and measurement. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft, which store vast amounts of data on their cloud services, see major opportunities.

Friends of the Earth’s Jim Thomas describes the need to gather, process and analyse data – from soil, water and tissue, counting invasive species or forest cover – as “like Christmas” for tech companies.

“They are casting the challenges of biodiversity conservation as a set of technical problems to be ‘fixed’ rather than political, human rights and socio-economic problems to be addressed through regulation and protection,” he said, adding that the biodiversity convention was “an opportunity for the world’s biggest companies to get even richer and more powerful”.

In addition to business opportunities from data storage, tech companies such as Google and Microsoft are the largest players in an emerging field called “generative biology” – which uses AI to design new genomes, viruses and proteins.

A spokesperson from Amazon said: “Amazon is committed to protecting the natural world and investing in conservation and restoration initiatives that support biodiversity. We sent a small delegation from our sustainability team to COP16 to understand how the private and public sector can better work together.”

While the biodiversity COPs, which grew out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, have a history of taking a precautionary approach to new technologies – setting up expert groups to ‘horizon scan’ for potential threats, agreeing on oversight guidelines and moratoriums – Thomas believes this past wariness has been undermined by “techno-utopian shift” at the summit in Colombia.

While tech companies may see a huge role for data and AI in nature-protection efforts, not everyone is convinced. Cloud services have a huge environmental footprint; as of 2022 they generated the same amount of emissions as the aviation industry.

Juan Bay from the Waorani nation of Ecuador is also uncomfortable with what he sees as business people and banks trying to take advantage.

“Technology like satellites can be useful for monitoring but it can bring problems,” he says. “It’s thanks to us that nature is intact. Indigenous people are the ones who have guaranteed the protection of the Amazon, with our knowledge and understanding – advanced technology hasn’t protected or saved nature, it’s just brought destruction and death.”

He has a counter proposal: the creation of the Yasuní fund, a $3 million investment plan direct to 3,500 Waorani community members, to help end oil and gas extraction on their territory, and support community-centred development instead.

More Guardrails Needed

Other industries which have long been a staple at biodiversity COPs also increased their numbers this year.

Oil and gas delegates, for example, crept up by 11 percent, totalling 40 lobbyists including representatives of ExxonMobil and Shell. Many of these came through the oil and gas industry group Ipieca, a presence at biodiversity COPs for the three decades since they began.

A spokesperson from Shell said: “A small number of Shell’s staff attended COP16 to gather external insights, understand policy developments, and strengthen partnerships.”

Overall figures calculated by DeSmog for business sectors are conservative estimates. DeSmog’s methodology included searching for the largest companies (by top ten and twenty by market share) – in sectors which use nature, and who had an interest in outcomes at the summit this year, and their sector’s trade groups. Industries analysed included agriculture, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, mining, fossil fuels and big tech.

Other destructive companies that were present, but fell outside the scope of DeSmog’s analysis, were Suzano, a major player in the pulp and paper industry, which causes large-scale forest destruction. Four delegates from the world’s largest cement company, Cemex, also attended, with the corporate Wildlife Habitat Council initiative, which registered as a non-governmental organisation. 

Under the scope of this analysis, national or regional business groups brought in by mixed trade groups such as the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) and the International Chamber of Commerce were not included in the study.

Nonetheless some of these mixed business groups, such as the Japanese Chamber of Commerce’s Keidanren Nature Conservation Council (KNCC) engaged in lobbying themselves. The KNCC brought 46 delegates, as well as hosting a COP16 pavilion, and publicly pushed back against a mandatory levy for companies using Digital Sequence Information for commercial ends.

DeSmog also only analysed official participants registered in COP’s Blue Zone. Other companies only present in the Green Zone (which anyone can attend without a badge) included Meta, as well as a scores of mining companies. 

Anne Maina, national coordinator of non-profit The Biodiversity and Biosafety Association of Kenya (BIBA-Kenya), said she recognised government officials in African delegations with close industry ties along with students funded by big business who “play to the industry’s tune”.

The CBD secretariat said: “COP16 has seen much higher registration numbers and more diverse participation than previous COPs. Accreditation and registration of observers, including industry representatives, is carried out in accordance with the rules of procedure and relevant decisions of the Conference of the Parties”.

Some individuals’ business affiliations were not immediately clear from the official list. Jim Thomas said better safeguards were needed: “We need much more robust investigations and light shone on to the ways that industry seeks to influence and skew outcomes under the convention for biological diversity and other multilateral agreements,” he said. “There needs to be more guardrails against corporate influence.”