On Monday, nearly all countries participated in a UN-backed meeting to prevent the loss of biodiversity. This was crucial to avoid the extinction or emergence of pathogens such as the coronavirus and the damage to the lives and livelihoods, especially of Indigenous peoples, around the globe.
After a delay of two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2002, the two-week-long meeting of more than 190 countries on Convention on Biological Diversity will be the last of its kind before a major conference to be held in Kunming, China in the next few months. This conference will attempt to adopt an international agreement to protect biodiversity.
The convention’s executive secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema stated Monday that they have one goal: to reverse the trend of biodiversity loss and to create a shared future to live in harmony in the long-term. The possibility of diplomatic fallout from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine lurked in background, potentially threatening any prospects for global unity on this issue. Russian delegates who were due to attend the meeting were forced to cancel their travel plans after Europe was closed to Russian aircraft.
Three years ago, an intergovernmental, science-based assessment worldwide of biodiversity found that there was a decline in nature at unprecedented rates and an acceleration in the extinction of species. This is according to the three-year-old report. Up to a million species could be extinct within the next decade.
Campaign For Nature, an American non-profit organization, stated that Geneva will focus on protecting and conserving at least 30% of the world’s lands, inland water, and oceans. This will help stop habitat loss, overexploitation by humans and businesses, as well as the emergence and spread of pathogens that thrive in change in the environment.
Convention managers identify five factors that lead to biodiversity loss: Changes in land and sea use; unsustainable exploitation of resources like agriculture; climate change; polluting; and the spread and expansion of invasive alien species into new environments. It says that unsustainable production as well as consumption play an indirect role.
Mrema said one key issue will be efforts toward repurposing and redirecting harmful subsidies to the tune of some USD 500 billion per year currently and how these financial flows can move away from nature-negative to biodiversity-positive outcomes. A draft proposal for China’s framework to be adopted would call for USD 700 billion to be spent on improving or maintaining biodiversity. She said that the draft also addresses the issue regarding plastic pollution.
(This story was not edited by Devdiscourse staff. It is generated automatically from a syndicated feed.
