Sharm el-Sheikh – Egypt

The main architects of the Paris agreement, the cornerstone of the fight against climate change, called on Wednesday for a similar deal at a crucial global biodiversity conference in December in Montreal.

“Climate change is becoming one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss, while our accelerated destruction of nature is undermining its ability to provide crucial services, including climate change mitigation and adaptation,” the five “champions of the Paris agreement” wrote.
However, “there is no way to limit global warming to 1.5°C (the most ambitious target of the Paris agreement) without taking action to protect and restore nature,” they write, recalling the “interconnectedness of the climate and biodiversity crises”.

They therefore “urge leaders to step up action to address the accelerating loss of nature by delivering an ambitious and game-changing global agreement on biodiversity at COP15.

The text is signed by Laurent Fabius, who as French Foreign Minister chaired COP21 in Paris in 2015, Christiana Figueres, who chaired the UN Climate Agency at the time the agreement was reached, Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, “champion of the Action Agenda for Nature and People” of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and Laurence Tubiana, France’s Special Representative at COP21.
A few weeks before the opening of the COP15 on biodiversity on 7 December, many observers are worried about a possible failure of this “conference of the parties”.

For three years, the signatories of the CBD – 195 countries and the European Union but not the United States – have been trying to define a global framework until 2030 for the protection of nature and its resources, which are essential for humans, while previous objectives for the preservation of biodiversity have not been met.

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Agence France-Presse