Climate Home News
June 27, 2022
The fourth round of negotiations to agree on an international framework to halt the destruction of the earth’s ecosystems ended in Nairobi, Kenya, on Sunday, with virtually no progress being made.
“It’s a bleak picture,” Brian O’Donnell director of the Campaign for Nature, told Climate Home News. “Negotiators resorted to technical bickering rather than aligning on ambition. There has been no discernible movement on the most important issues.”
The meeting was the last planned before negotiators meet at Cop15 in Montreal, Canada, from 5-17 December, to finalise the agreement which has been widely billed as the “Paris Agreement for nature”.
But four years since the start of the process, the biodiversity pact barely registers on the international agenda, as governments wrangle with the coronavirus pandemic, Russia’s war on Ukraine and soaring inflation.
Eight conservation groups have urged UN chief António Guterres to convene political leaders to “step in and help get it done” in an open letter. “We must sound the alarm that this process has reached a crisis point,” they wrote.