Good afternoon everyone, President Gustavo Petro, Vice President Francia Márquez, President of COP 15, Minister of China, Chancellor, ministers, governor of Valle, and mayor of Cali, and all the delegates who have decisively accepted this invitation from the Government of Colombia.
By coincidence, we will have two years of environmental discussions in Latin America: COP 16 on Biodiversity in Cali, Colombia, and COP 30 on Climate in Brazil. But perhaps these coincidences do not really exist. Coming from a country where, after 60 years of armed conflict, with this cultural diversity of peoples, crossroads, and one of the world’s greatest ecological diversities—yet for many decades, we ourselves could not even appreciate it due to the unbearable pain of war, conflict, massacre, and even genocide—a country seeking to consolidate peace with a breath of relief, we are now discovering, to our amazement, that those areas that were inaccessible for years are among the most biodiverse, important, and rich in the world.
But today, the challenge is to consolidate peace in these regions, in these biomes, in a country that is at once Pacific, Amazonian, Andean, Caribbean, and Orinoquian. To achieve this, we have realized that peace in a territory cannot be consolidated without including diversity, without incorporating specific knowledge, and without also making peace with nature.
From this experience, from this vital pursuit, as President Petro said, we are today in the heart of the world. Colombia is hosting COP 16 to invite the world to seek peace with nature. In a dark time, where what we see is that the way forward is not through politics but through war, through eliminating the other rather than including them.
And while we waste precious time and resources in this transition—resources that are quickly found for war but are scarce and difficult to secure for caring for life, biodiversity, and the climate transition, with complex agreements—we need to seek a change in vision, a shift in paradigm.
For us, Peace with Nature implies a conceptual change in values. Nature is not a resource; it is the fabric of life that makes our own existence possible. Therefore, we must collectively, building on the legacy of the Kunming-Montreal Framework’s 23 goals, move forward. These goals are not rhetorical; they were a significant achievement of multilateralism, an important result of international negotiations, mobilizing all sectors of society and sparking curiosity across various government sectors, because protecting biodiversity is not just the responsibility of the environment minister. But this framework is also beginning to mobilize society as a whole.
Under this legacy, we must take a further step. It is not just about implementation mechanisms; it is fundamentally about reshaping the way we live, rethinking our development model, and redefining how we coexist in diversity. We must establish a system that does not continuously make nature a victim of development, but rather ensures that our societal reproduction supports life. Today, this can be seen as a significant risk: the risk of climate change, the risk of biodiversity loss, which is already causing disasters in 25% of the Earth's surface, rendering it incapable of producing water and leading to desertification.
However, it can also be viewed as a profound question for convergence, a common purpose, a search for the future. How do we rethink society, the economy, the ways we live, and development models to make peace with nature? This question, to which we do not yet have a clear answer, demands special care.
We have seen how we accelerate the energy transition and decarbonization, which are absolutely essential because if we do not stabilize the climate, ecosystems will not be able to adapt to new conditions. But this transition cannot come at the cost of life itself. This convergence must find in nature its main ally to make the transition. There are two fundamental and simultaneous movements: decarbonizing and restoring lost nature to allow it to once again take control of life forces on the planet.
And this is not just a rhetorical idea. The extraction and exploitative use of natural resources today account for 50% of greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to 90% of biodiversity loss. On the other hand, significantly restoring ecosystems and nature could contribute almost 40% to stabilizing the climate and the carbon cycle.
Thus, these are two intertwined agendas, and one cannot be sacrificed for the other. This forum for global policy must be the place to discuss mechanisms and create regulations to implement these movements in a dangerous world.
We warmly welcome you to Cali, Colombia, a region culturally and ecologically diverse not only in Colombia but globally. In this COP 16, where we invite you to make peace with nature, it is impossible to achieve without cultural diversity and the mobilization of human experience. The world is a place of great uncertainty. We must draw on the experiences of all civilizations, cultures, and knowledge that have existed on this planet.
In the dialogue between ancestral knowledge, rooted in our understanding of ecology and life, and scientific capacity, we can achieve a transition not to return to the past but to create at least livable and relatively stable conditions for a new society that will emerge in the light of crisis. As this new society will emerge in crisis, it must also emerge through mobilization and the peoples' actions. That is why we have called for this to be the COP of the people.
Yesterday, in one of over 100 PreCOP meetings organized to ensure social engagement beyond these four walls, a 16-year-old boy at the children's biodiversity meeting shared his seven-year relationship with ants. He described how ants, of different sizes, colors, and behaviors, communicate and coordinate to build great things without speaking. He left us with a question: "Minister, I see how ants, without speaking, work together to achieve remarkable things. Will COP 16 in Cali be the place where we, like ants, unite to mobilize life and make peace with nature".
Welcome, together we can make it happen!