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170 countries meet to safeguard natural resources

Dunya News

A major UN meeting designed to safeguard the world's natural resources began Monday in India.

More than 170 countries are meeting 170 countries meet to safeguard natural resources city of Hyderabad over the next 12 days under the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), an offshoot of the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.UN environmental experts have warned that the world has as little as a decade to fend off a species extinction that also poses a threat to humanity.And more than two decades after the Rio summit, the CBDs executive secretary Braulio Ferreira De Souza Dias said that it was still a struggle to persuade governments to put biodiversity at the centre of development agendas.Nearly half of amphibian species, a third of corals, a quarter of mammals, a fifth of all plants and 13 percent of the worlds birds are at risk of extinction, according to the Red List compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).The last CBD conference in Nagoya, Japan, adopted a 20-point plan in 2010 to turn back biodiversity loss by 2020.But it has been a battle since then to find the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to fund such a commitment at a time when the developed world finds itself in economic difficulties.Jayanthi Natarajan, Indias environment minister, said failure to fund the protection of biodiversity would mean a higher price to pay in the long term.Countries pledged under the Millennium Development Goals to achieve a significant reduction in the rate of plant and animal loss by 2010, but the UN admits the goal has been missed by some distance.