H.E. Mr. Huang Runqiu, Minister of Ecology and Environment of the People’s Republic of China and the President of COP15,
Ministers, Excellencies, friends.
Today’s event hosted by China, the Presidency of COP15, is an opportunity to renew political momentum to facilitate the negotiation of the Global Biodiversity Framework.
My thanks to the Parties, the COP Presidency, CBD Secretariat, and partners for the progress made so far, including the Leaders’ Summit on biodiversity and the adoption of the Kunming Declaration. However, despite the achievement of four meetings of the Open-ended Working Group, much work is needed before and at COP15 to reach a final agreement.
21 targets are still in square brackets. Critical issues remain to be resolved, including matters related to resource mobilization, mechanisms for monitoring, reporting and review, and access and benefit sharing related to digital sequence information on genetic resources.
The framework must address the five drivers of biodiversity loss: the changing use of sea and land, overexploitation, pollution, climate change and invasive species. We must translate action on these drivers into the agriculture sector, into the infrastructure sector, into the kind of policies and key levers that we must deploy. We want targets that we can measure. We want this to make sense. We want this to add up to no net loss.
We must adopt a transformational Global Biodiversity Framework. Crucially, the framework must also speak to all parts of government and society, and the commitments it includes must be urgently delivered. Finance will play a crucial role in implementation. The GEF’s eighth replenishment brought nearly USD 3.4 billion dedicated to biodiversity. There is growing recognition of the need for leveraging private finance and increasing domestic resource mobilization. But we need to do more.
Finding common ground is not always easy, I know. But we can do it. We must do it. Because biodiversity loss is putting us all in danger.
