Beijing, Oct 13 (AFP/APP):Almost 200 nations pledged Wednesday to tackle ecological destruction at a key UN conservation summit in China.
Delegates from some 195 countries said they would support the ‘Kunming Declaration’ — working to tackle issues around biodiversity and species protection — in the first segment of the two-part COP15 summit in the southern Chinese city Kunming.
The pledge is expected to pave the way for a new accord next year that will set out global conservation targets for 2030 and 2050.
However, environmentalists said it did not make enough progress on the biodiversity targets decided by countries in 2010’s Aichi agreement.
China’s Minister of Ecology and Environment Huang Runqiu said it sent a strong message to the international community, but noted it was “not a legally binding instrument.”
Countries will continue negotiating on a “post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework” in Geneva in January 2022, and then later at the second part of the summit in April and May next year.
“If the content of the (Kunming) declaration will be mirrored in the framework, then we would have moved 10 steps forward,” said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), a treaty ratified by 195 countries and the European Union.
The declaration urges countries to recognise the importance of biodiversity in human health, strengthen species protection laws, improve the sharing of genetic resources, as well as integrating local communities into conservation work.
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