About COP 16
The 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will be held in Cali, Colombia this October 21st until November 1st.
COP16 will be crucial in shaping the global biodiversity agenda and actions for the next decade, particularly in implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. For GEO BON, it is a pivotal moment to highlight the role of biodiversity observation networks in tracking progress toward biodiversity goals. These networks help provide the data necessary for governments to develop and update their National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs), aligning with global conservation targets.
The theme, “Peace with Nature”, emphasizes the importance of harmonious, sustainable development, highlighting the need for collaboration between countries and networks like GEO BON to integrate biodiversity data into policy-making, ensuring informed decisions that contribute to both ecological and societal well-being.
GEO BON at COP 16
This year for the first time, GEO BON will host a shared pavilion together with GEO, Ai2 and Esri under the theme “From Genes to Ecosystems”, which aims to highlight the vast and complex biodiversity of our changing planet. This theme integrates a wide spectrum of biodiversity observation approaches, from satellite imagery to community-based monitoring, addressing the critical need for data and knowledge across scales. The pavilion will host numerous events organized by GEO BON, showcasing activities and tools, including BON in a Box and the EBV Data Ecosystem, that can support biodiversity monitoring and meeting global needs for biodiversity knowledge and informing policy.
Thank you to our pavilion funders Ai2, Esri, GEO, Government of Switzerland, and Maxar.
BON in a Box SIDE EVENT
BON in Box as a tool for implementation and reporting on the monitoring framework
When: October 22nd – 11:40am
Where: Nuqui – Academia & Research meeting room (Plaza One)
Assessing progress towards the goals and targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (KMGBF) requires collaboration across scales to monitor biodiversity change. Current monitoring efforts and tools are developed by individual actors without being shared across organizations and borders, which can lead to the duplication of effort in some places while others have less resources to allocate to biodiversity reporting. As an existing platform, BON in a Box can provide biodiversity monitoring tools and facilitate coordination and collaboration among countries and data sources (e.g, EBV data portal, GBIF, OBIS). BON in a Box now provides an open-source, fully transparent platform that allows users to contribute data and analysis pipelines to calculate indicators which can then be used for reporting to assess progress towards biodiversity targets. BON in Box can integrate diverse data and expert knowledge, from Earth observation to genetic diversity metrics to calculate monitoring framework indicators. In this side-event, GEO BON and partners will present the tools that are available in BON in a Box, how they are currently being used and applied in countries, and how they can be developed in the future.
Thank you to Cardiff University for sponsoring translation in Spanish, French and Chinese.