Delegates failed to agree a financial roadmap at the Cali summit earlier this month.
But COP16 president, Colombia's Environment Minister Susana Muhamad, told AFP on the sidelines of COP29 climate talks in Baku she was confident of an agreement early next year.
The 196 member countries of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity left Cali two weeks ago unable to agree a financial plan to bolster efforts to halt the destruction of nature by 2030, despite discussion overrunning by hours.
Instead, participants adopted a plan for a multilateral fund designed to be supplemented by private firms profiting from the digital sequencing of genome source information.
Muhamad noted that this in itself constituted a "groundmaking mechanism" to foster investment in biodiversity conservation. There had been further progress on setting a wider roadmap to finance biodiversity, she added.
"Hopefully in the next plenary we should be (able) in the first quarter of next year to close COP16 (and) we will be able to get to that agreement ...in the first quarter of 2025," she told AFP.
A formal signing of the dossier would likely come at the secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity in Montreal, she added.
The Cali summit drew an unprecedented 23,000 participants to the largest summit yet on biodiversity seeking to push beyond the timid application of the Kunming-Montreal accord two years ago to save the planet from deforestation, overexploitation, climate change and pollution.