Thomson Reuters Foundation News

June 27, 2022
Vital talks aimed at hammering out a new global pact to protect and restore nature did not make sufficient progress last week and are on the brink of failure, environmentalists have warned, urging political leaders to step in to salvage negotiations.

About 195 countries are set to finalise a deal to stem human damage to plants, animals and ecosystems - similar to the Paris climate agreement - at a U.N. summit, known as COP15, now set for December after being switched from China to Montreal.

The talks have been delayed due to logistical difficulties caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Negotiators met in Nairobi last week to work on a draft agreement after the first in-person session in two years in Geneva in March fell short.    

Marco Lambertini, director general of green group WWF International, said governments had moved forward on "very few elements of the draft" text during the last six days of talks.

That, he warned, leaves "the chance of securing an ambitious global agreement capable of tackling the world's accelerating nature crisis hanging by a thread". 

"We risk facing a 2030 world with even less biodiversity than we have today, driving entire ecosystems to collapse - that is just unacceptable," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

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InterPress Service

June 27, 2022
As the last working group meeting of the Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Agenda concluded here on Sunday, the delegates’ job at COP15 Montreal just got tougher as delegates couldn’t finalize the text of the agenda. Texts involving finance, cost and benefit-sharing, and digital sequencing – described by many as ‘most contentious parts of the draft agenda barely made any progress as negotiators failed to reach any consensus.

The week-long 4th meeting of the Working Group of the Biodiversity Convention took place from June 21-26, three months after the 3rd meeting of the group was held in Geneva, Switzerland. The meeting, attended by a total of 1634 participants, including 950 country representatives, had the job cut out for them: Read the draft Post 2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) and its 21 targets, discuss, and clean up the text – target by target, sentence by sentence, at least up to 80%.

But, on Saturday – a day before the meeting was to wrap up, David Ainsworth – head of Communications at CBD, hinted that the progress was far slower than expected. Ainsworth mentioned that the total cleaning progress made was just about 8%.

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Reuters

June 25, 2022
With only two days left to hash out a U.N. draft agreement to protect global biodiversity, organizers on Friday urged delegates in Nairobi to "pick up the pace".

"We cannot afford to spend hours discussing one line of text," Basile van Havre, one of the two co-chairs of the talks, told Reuters.

Negotiations are scheduled to end on Sunday, with the draft agreement to be adopted in December by governments at a key biodiversity summit, known as "COP15".

But "at the current pace as we've seen, it will not be possible to have text [ready] for COP15," said co-chair Francis Ogwal during a plenary on Friday.

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BirdLife International

June 20, 2022
From tomorrow (21-26 June), negotiators from around the world will convene in Nairobi, Kenya to work through the latest draft of the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework – a global plan to protect and restore biodiversity as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). The final framework is expected to be adopted by the world’s governments at the upcoming UN biodiversity conference, COP15 (Conference of Parties), later this year. This meeting follows the Geneva meeting in March, which was criticised for its slow progress.

Despite uncertainty around the timing of COP15, the urgency to tackle the biodiversity crisis is ever present. We cannot afford any further delays in moving towards the completion of the global biodiversity framework and adoption at COP.

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