Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what his priorities for COP16 are.

The UK played a leading role at COP15 of the Convention on Biological Diversity in securing agreement to a historic package of measures to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. Our priority for COP16 and beyond is to drive global delivery of these agreements both at home and abroad, by working closely with our international partners.

We have a number of priorities for COP16. These include supporting a global review of those National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans which will have been published by the time of the COP, in order to assess the extent to which the world is on track to meet the commitments made at COP15; finalising the details of the global mechanism for the sharing of benefits arising from the use of Digital Sequence Information (DSI) on genetic resources; and increasing the mobilisation of resources from all sources to halt and reverse biodiversity loss globally, including through the newly-established Global Biodiversity Framework Fund, to which the UK has already made an initial contribution of £10million.