COP15: How important is the Canadian UN Biodiversity Conference? Why is the chair country China? – BBC News Chinese

He said the COP15 conference was the “best and last chance” to stop and reverse the natural decline.

The long overdue international talks come after Nature England and other UK government agencies presented their vision for restoring nature at an event at the Royal Society in London.

Lord Benyang, the UK’s international minister for natural affairs, said a healthy natural environment is “the cornerstone of a healthy climate, a safe and clean water supply, and a resilient food supply”.

The earliest “United Nations Biodiversity” was reached at the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1995. Already 195 countries and the European Union have acceded to the Convention, and the United States is the only UN member that has not yet ratified it.

Biodiversity refers to all the different living things on Earth and how they are adapted to coexist in the delicate web of life. The new Global Framework Agreement on Biodiversity is seen as the natural equivalent of the Paris Climate Agreement. The Paris Climate Agreement is an international treaty in which countries pledge to limit the rise in global temperatures.

Some of the main goals of the Biodiversity Summit include:

The summit comes after COP27, the UN climate conference in Egypt, was seen as a disappointing outcome.

While wildlife charity WWF welcomed the establishment of a climate change loss and damage fund in the final agreement at COP27, it said failure to agree to more ambitious action to reduce emissions would mean “a global The goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C is slipping away, with catastrophic consequences for the world.”

“We must remember that the climate crisis and the biodiversity crisis are the defining crises of our time,” Dr Fernanda Cavallo, head of climate policy at WWF, told the BBC at the climate conference.

Without addressing these issues, “we may not have a planet to live in in the future,” she added.

The UK government has pledged to protect 30% of its land and seas by 2030.

And according to the Wildlife Trust, little progress has been made so far. By 2022, only 3% of land and 8% of oceans will be effectively protected.

The UK government has also faced criticism from nature campaigners for missing a deadline required under UK environmental law to set conservation targets.

The COP15 conference in Montreal is now three years behind schedule due to repeated delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

This makes it difficult for the world as a whole to set targets over the next 10 years to stop species extinctions and reverse the loss of the global natural environment.

COP15 was originally planned to be held in Kunming, China in October 2020, but due to the outbreak of the new crown epidemic in 2020 and China’s strict epidemic prevention restrictions, it was impossible to hold an offline meeting, and the meeting was forced to be postponed 4 times.

In order to maintain the momentum of COP15, the first phase of the meeting in October 2021 will be officially held in Kunming, China, mainly in the form of online meetings, and all parties adopted the non-binding “Kunming Declaration” at this meeting.

As China is still implementing new crown epidemic prevention and control measures, the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity announced in June 2022 that the main part of COP15 will be transferred to Montreal, Canada in December 2022, but China will still be the host of this meeting. official presidency.

Huang Runqiu, Minister of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of China, will chair the conference.

This will be the first time that China has led a major UN intergovernmental negotiation on the environment, and it will be interesting to see whether the Chinese government can creatively bring other countries together in its presidency to reach an ambitious agreement.

While biodiversity and climate change are inextricably linked and need to be addressed together, COP15 will focus on strategies to halt biodiversity loss, while COP27 will focus on increasing efforts to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees and mitigate climate change. Ambition for change.

The clear objectives of the UN climate change negotiations make it easier for the public to pay attention. Countries around the world need to raise awareness of the biodiversity crisis to give it a similar level of attention.

Nature holds the key to achieving net zero emissions and will provide us with solutions to the challenges posed by climate change, including drought, land use, food security and more.

On the issue of protecting the ecological environment, COP15 also has global gaps and major differences between the North and the South. Many developing countries want richer developed countries to provide more funding to promote this protection.

Setting and reporting on individual country targets, and how to monitor implementation are challenges that need to be negotiated.