UN

September 21, 2022
Following is the text of UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s video message to the seventh Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Business Forum, held virtually, today:

Excellencies, business leaders, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining the seventh SDG Business Forum.  This year’s event has provided a much-needed space for business leaders to share their experiences and insights to overcome our common challenges — from the COVID‑19 pandemic, to the war in Ukraine and its impacts on food, energy and finance, to the escalating climate emergency.

The private sector is an indispensable partner in promoting investment in sustainable development and mobilizing financing to achieve the 2030 Agenda.

Let me highlight two key messages from today’s discussions.  First, the business community should be a driving force to protect our global environmental commons, from climate action to ending pollution and restoring biodiversity.

Investing in biodiversity makes both environmental and economic sense.  Estimates by the World Economic Forum suggest that protecting nature and increasing biodiversity could generate business opportunities worth $10 trillion a year and create nearly 400 million new jobs.

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UN Environmental Programme

September 7, 2022
The extent to which our global economy and financial system can flourish is fundamentally underpinned by the state of nature. However, our natural world continues to be rapidly and dangerously eroded. WWF and 90 civil society partners have urged central banks and financial supervisors to manage climate and biodiversity related financial risks as part of their primary mandates. Their call for action emphasizes how losses to nature and biodiversity pose material risks to the financial systemand includes demands for consistent, market-wide risk identification and disclosure and also for promoting the enabling environment for new financial opportunities. Jessica Smith from UNEP FI and Thomas Viegas from the Bank of England (Manager, Market Intelligence and Analysis) explain why they welcome this development and why nature has reached a tipping point where it’s no longer about ‘if’ we act to mitigate nature-risk but ‘how’ and ‘where’.

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Diálogo China

July 21, 2022
After two years of postponements and a change in format, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s COP15 biodiversity talks will now take place in Montreal, Canada, this December. There is still much work to do in the coming months, if countries are to secure a new global agreement on protecting biodiversity in the coming decade.

At the recent UN Ocean Conference, which took place in Lisbon earlier this month, China Dialogue Ocean spoke with Elizabeth Mrema, the CBD’s executive secretary, about progress so far, on why the talks were relocated from China to Canada, and what needs to happen in the run-up to the event.

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The Guardian

June 21, 2022
The date for a key UN nature summit has finally been confirmed after more than two years of delays and amid fears momentum to halt biodiversity loss across the globe has been lost.

Ahead of the latest round of negotiations in Nairobi this week, the UN convention on biological diversity confirmed that the Cop15 biodiversity conference will now take place in Montreal, Canada, from 5 to 17 December, after it became clear China would not be able to host the event in Kunming due to the country’s zero-Covid policy.

It comes after several pandemic-related delays to the meeting, which was meant to take place in October 2020, and amid intense frustration with Beijing, who are holding the presidency for a major UN environmental agreement for the first time.

Fears had been building over the prohibitive cost for smaller countries to participate in Cop15 if it were held in China, along with concerns over restrictions on civil society, Indigenous groups and the press.

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Edie

June 21, 2022
The summit was originally planned for Kunming, China, in 2020. It was delayed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequently split into two parts, with the first part successfully completed in Kunming in October 2021 and the second meeting in Kunming taking place this spring.

The second meeting was unsuccessful, with no final deal agreed. Interim talks in Nairobi were, therefore, added to the UN’s calendar for this summer, and a final meeting for Kunming in autumn. However, China saw a spike in Covid-19 cases in the first quarter of the year and places including Beijing and Shanghai were put into lockdown.

With all of this in mind, concern had been growing that the summit would not conclude this year if its conclusion depended on a face-to-face event in China. This would mean that the post-2020 set of international biodiversity goals would be more than two years delayed in terms of their creation and implementation. The previous set of goals, the Aichi Goals, went unmet, and pressure is mounting on the UN to deliver a strong agreement to prevent Earth’s sixth mass extinction.

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Reuters

June 21, 2022
The United Nations said on Tuesday it would move talks to secure a global post-2020 biodiversity agreement from Kunming in China to Montreal, Canada, following multiple pandemic-related delays.

Delegates to the Dec. 5-17 summit of the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity, known as COP-15, will aim to adopt a global framework for biodiversity to halt and reverse losses of the world's plants, animals, and ecosystems.

Initially scheduled to take place in the southwestern Chinese city in October 2020, COP15 was delayed due to COVID-19. Though a first round of discussions was held virtually in Kunming in October 2021, the convention's secretariat announced this March that the summit had been delayed for a fourth time as China battled another wave of COVID-19 cases.

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NewScientist

June 20, 2022
A long-delayed UN biodiversity summit will be held in Canada this year rather than China as originally planned, after concerns that the Chinese government would postpone it until 2023 due to covid-19.

The COP15 meeting of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) aims to bring together the world’s governments to agree a new deal on halting the loss of animals, plants and habitats globally by 2030.

However, the conference has been repeatedly delayed from its original date of October 2020 due to the covid-19 pandemic, despite other major environment summits taking place. Now, a decision has been taken by the COP bureau to relocate the meeting from Kunming, China, to Montreal, Canada, on 5 to 17 December, three sources have told New Scientist. An official announcement by the CBD is expected imminently today.

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Yahoo! Sports

June 20, 2022
The annual global summit on biodiversity, COP15, has been delayed by two months to December and will now be hosted in Canada rather than China, according to environmental charities.

This follows concerns the Chinese government would postpone the event for a fourth time into 2023 because of Covid-19 - the conference was originally due to be held in 2020.

The summit will provide governments a chance to come up with a long-term plan to reverse the threat to life on Earth - nearly a third of all species are currently endangered due to human activities.

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LA Times

March 7, 2022
In the latest United Nations report on climate change, scientists document the stark toll inflicted by global warming through more intense heat waves, droughts, floods and other disasters, and present a dire warning that humanity should act quickly to move away from fossil fuels and cut planet-heating emissions.

The report goes beyond past assessments not only by detailing the latest science but also by focusing on how the world, while reducing emissions, can better adapt to the accelerating effects of climate change to reduce risks and protect especially vulnerable people.

The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, stresses that the threats to people’s health, livelihoods and lives disproportionately affect those who lack resources to weather the blows. In pursuing climate solutions, the report’s authors say, there should be a focus on equity and justice, because the effects are exacerbating inequality and hitting especially hard for low-income people, marginalized communities and developing countries.

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New Straits Times

November 7, 2021
Since 1994 the United Nations (UN) has convened almost every country on Earth for an annual summit known as the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

This year's two-week 26th meeting, COP26, is described as "the most significant climate event since the 2015 Paris Agreement" which committed nations to limiting global warming to well below 2°C (preferably 1.5°C), and "the world's best and last chance to get runaway climate change under control."

United States President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Indonesian President Joko Widodo were among the 200 world leaders attending the first two days of the conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

Malaysia is ably represented by the savvy Secretary-General of the Water and Environment Ministry Datuk Seri Dr Zaini Ujang.

The conspicuous absence of more senior representation, though, seemed to many a sign that Malaysians were nonchalant about the event. That is, until a big headline appeared saying that more than 100 world leaders had promised to end and reverse deforestation by 2030.

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The New York Times

August 9, 2021
Nations have delayed curbing their fossil-fuel emissions for so long that they can no longer stop global warming from intensifying over the next 30 years, though there is still a short window to prevent the most harrowing future, a major new United Nations scientific report has concluded.

Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century, largely by burning coal, oil and gas for energy. And the consequences can be felt across the globe: This summer alone, blistering heat waves have killed hundreds of people in the United States and Canada, floods have devastated Germany and China, and wildfires have raged out of control in Siberia, Turkey and Greece.

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UNDP

July 15, 2021
It is time for change. Two years ago, the Financial Times launched its ‘New Agenda’ campaign with a five-word front page – ‘Capitalism: time for a reset.’ Last year, UNDP launched its annual Human Development Report “The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene” with the stark conclusion that no country has been able to achieve a high level of human development without first having significantly harmed the environment. And over the past few days, at the 2021 High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development, nature and climate have been front and centre as states have been discussing “sustainable and resilient recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic”. Many reports on the decline of nature, such as the Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, all point to a single conclusion: it is time for widespread societal change on nature, climate and economy. But what kinds of changes are most needed?

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Green Queen

June 25, 2021
Until now, many of our global efforts to tackle biodiversity loss and climate change have been done separately from each other. Scientists are now calling for a new approach that takes both issues as intrinsically linked—we can’t solve one without the other.  

This is the core message of what is the first collaborative report between experts from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). According to the team of 50 scientists selected by the 12-person committee selected by the two bodies, biodiversity loss and climate change are both driven by human economic activities and are mutually reinforcing. 

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World Economic Forum

June 21, 2021
The twin crises of nature loss and climate change are inextricably linked. For too long, however, biodiversity loss and climate change have been discussed and dealt with in siloes, even by independent international frameworks of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. We may, however, be at an important turning point.

For the first time, intergovernmental scientific bodies for each global challenge, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) have worked together on a report, which is the result of a co-sponsored workshop of 50 climate and biodiversity experts. The report finds that we can either solve both crises or solve neither.

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Mongabay

June 14, 2021
The push to halt climate change too often neglects the interconnected issue of biodiversity loss, according to a recent report from a panel of scientists with the United Nations.

“What we want to emphasize here is how relevant biodiversity conservation is for climate change mitigation,” said Anne Larigauderie, executive secretary of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), in a press conference launching the June 10 report.

In a first-ever collaboration, scientists from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and IPBES teamed up to draw on research looking at the convergence of the biodiversity and climate crises, how they’re affecting all life, including humans, on Earth and what’s being done about them.

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