Crucial UN meet to focus on reversing destruction of nature
PARIS: China will on Monday open a crucial United Nations biodiversity summit from October 11-15 to build political momentum to halt and even reverse the destruction of nature by man.
As the human population climbs towards 9 billion by midcentury, animals are being crowded, eaten, snared, poisoned, poached, hawked and hunted out of existence.
Forests have been burned to the ground to grow commercial crops, and ecosystems that sustain life on the planet ravaged.
The virtual opening of the COP15 summit will transfer leadership from Egypt, which presided over the last gathering in 2018, to China.
During the talks, Beijing will orchestrate high-level online meetings with ministers from
scores of countries in a drive to build political momentum.
China - by far the world’s biggest emitter of carbon pollution that drives global warming and harms the environment - will
also issue a Kunming Declaration that will set the tone for its leadership, observers say.
“This declaration, we hope, will further underline and recognise the importance of biodiversity
for human health,” said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a treaty ratified by 195 countries and the European Union.
Since gathering in person in Rome last year, delegates have negotiated across cyberspace.
Next week’s online meet will be followed by in-person talks in Kunming from April 25 to May 8, with an intermediate session, also face-to-face, in Geneva in January.
The November COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, meanwhile, will seek to tame the increasingly devastating effects of global warming.
Discussions will focus on a negotiated draft text called the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Published in July, its stated goal is “living in harmony with nature” by 2050.
Financial targets include boosting investment in biodiversity protection to $200 billion per year within a decade, while reducing subsidies for environmentally harmful industries by “at least US $500 billion per year”.