Outcomes of international environmental meetings are always hailed as grand achievements but almost always produce unrealistic or unreachable results, most involving the promises of raising billions in annual funding that always falls far short of stated goals.

But at the 16th United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, started in Cali, Colombia, in October 2024 and finished in Rome, Italy, in February 2025, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), actually had new and tangible breakthrough achievements to celebrate, as this story of mine illustrates.

Highlights include the kind of official recognition from now on that enables IPLC leaders to be active, at-the-table negotiators on issues that involve them for the first time, and a new funding mechanism — the Cali Fund — that does not depend on donations but rather fees from global corporations who use nature-based genetic materials for commercial products. If companies contribute, as they are urged to do by COP16 final language, it could mean hundreds of millions annually for conservation projects identified specially by IPLCs.

“COP16 has been a great success and is historic for us,” Viviana Figueroa, a global technical coordinator with the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, told me from Rome.