Hopes for treaty rise at UN biodiversity summit

NAGOYA: Hopes rose that rich and poor nations would be able to forge a historic treaty to protect the world’s ecosystems after grinding progress was made at a UN summit on Thursday, delegates said.

Representatives of more than 190 countries have been meeting in the central Japanese city of Nagoya for nearly two weeks in an effort to set goals on saving habitats which would help to end the mass extinction of species.

With talks due to wind up Friday, delegates said last-minute negotiations among environment ministers had helped bridge key differences between developed and developing countries that had threatened to derail the event.

“Things are unlocking, but there is very little time left,” France’s state secretary for the environment, Chantal Jouanno, told AFP.

The European Commissioner for the Environment, Janez Potocnik, also emerged from talks in the afternoon to post an optimistic message on microblogging website Twitter: “Can we do it? Yes we can. But do the others agree?”The key dispute has been over fairly sharing the benefits of genetic resources such as wild plants.

Brazil and other developing countries argue rich nations and companies should not be allowed to freely take genetic resources to make medicines, cosmetics and other products for huge profits.

Brazil has maintained throughout that it would not agree to a 20-point plan on protecting nature unless there was first a deal on genetic resources with a legally binding “Access and Benefits Sharing Protocol”.

The planned protocol would ban so-called “biopiracy” and outline how countries with genetic resources would share in the benefits of the assets’

commercial development.

Brazil’s Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira told reporters that a deal on genetic resources had not yet been reached, but she believed a full pact on all the environment issues could still be reached by Friday night.

“I’m maintaining our optimism about all this. We believe that we have political momentum. We are working hard and we are optimistic about the results,” she said.

However other delegates said they were concerned that time was running out to strike a deal, particularly as some contentious issues would still have to be approved by their home governments.

One of the other key planks of the planned treaty delegates are hoping to sign on Friday is a strategic plan that commits countries to 20 targets for protecting ecosystems over the next decade.

These targets would aim to conserve large areas of coral reefs, waterways and forests, cut pollution and restore degraded ecosystems.

However, environment groups are concerned that some of the targets that are likely to be agreed upon will not be ambitious enough, particularly ones that aim to protect waterways.

While Greenpeace and other groups want 20 percent of coastal and marine areas protected, they say China and India are lobbying for six percent or lower.

The overarching goal of the Nagoya summit is to end the destruction of ecosystems that scientists say is causing the world’s plant and animal species to vanish at up to 1,000 times the natural rate.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature warned last year that the world was experiencing its sixth mass extinction in history, with the last one 65 million years ago wiping out dinosaurs.

The treaty to be signed in Nagoya would come under the UN’s Convention on Biological Diversity, which has 193 member nations. However the United States is not a party the convention. – AFP