UN meeting on saving planet's biodiversity kicks off

Negotiations opened Monday in Geneva to try to reach a more protective global framework for biodiversity, to be discussed at the COP15 biodiversity meeting in China later this year.

"The world is clearly eager to see urgent action to protect nature," commented the executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, quoted in a statement. "We have no time to lose. We must reach together, at the end, a truly historic agreement that puts us on the path to living in harmony with nature," she continued.

This session takes place from March 14 to 29.

This is the first face-to-face meeting for the delegations since February 2020 and the last one before the COP15, which was supposed to take place in April-May in Kunming, after several postponements.

The meeting in Geneva serves as an opportunity to announce new dates, according to the CBD Secretariat's statement. According to several sources, the new dates envisaged are end of August, and beginning of September.

Human activities are damaging nature.

In 2019, a report by UN biodiversity experts, IPBES, revealed that a million species could disappear in the coming decades.

Intensive agriculture is depleting soils, oceans are suffering from overfishing, plastics and other pollutants are spreading and threatening our health, climate change is altering ecosystems.

The global framework negotiated at the CBD aims to reverse the trend, after the failure of States to meet their previous commitments.