COP-15 SUMMIT AND BIODIVERSITY DEAL

After four years of fractious talks, nearly 200 countries, including India, approved a historic Paris-style deal on Monday to protect and reverse dangerous loss to global biodiversity, following an intense final session of negotiations at the UN COP-15 summit here in Canada.
Amid applause, Chinese Environment Minister Huang Runqiu, the president of the COP-15 biodiversity summit, which started on December 7, declared the Kunming-Montreal Agreement adopted.
The Chair manoeuvred to ignore Congo’s last-minute refusal, demanding greater funding for developing countries.
The Chinese-brokered deal is aimed at saving the lands, oceans and species from pollution, degradation and climate change. Monitored wildlife populations have seen a devastating 69% drop on average since 1970, according to the Living Planet Report (LPR) 2022 of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
Environment Minister, Bhupender Yadav, who was part of negotiations, told The Hindu that broadly the agreement was “positive” as far as India was concerned.
On Saturday, he laid out India’s position that goals and targets set in the Global Biodiversity Framework ought to be ambitious, as well as “realistic and practical”.

SOURCE: THE HINDU, THE ECONOMIC TIMES, PIB

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