Global meeting to save nature begins

Ireland’s Minister for Heritage will travel to the UN Biodiversity Conference COP15, where a new set of global goals for nature will be negotiated.

The UN Biodiversity Conference COP15 gets underway today in Montreal, Canada, under the Chinese Presidency. This highly significant meeting will seek to reset humanity’s relationship with the natural world by agreeing an ambitious global biodiversity framework, with targets to 2030.

COP15 is set against a stark scientific backdrop. IPBES, the global scientific platform on biodiversity, has reported that one million species – 25% of assessed plants and animals – are threatened with extinction and the majority of the world’s ecosystems are showing rapid declines. The rate of global change in nature during the past 50 years is unprecedented in human history. Transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors are required, according to its 2019 Global Assessment Report.

Ireland will be represented at COP15 by a delegation from the National Parks and Wildlife Service, headed up by Minister of State for Heritage and Electoral Reform, Malcolm Noonan TD.

Highlighting the importance of the meeting, Minister Noonan said;

“It’s no secret that the natural world is in crisis. Biodiversity is being lost at a rate faster than when the dinosaurs went extinct. We are all completely dependent on the web of life: a complex, resilient yet fragile system that is the product of three and a half billion years of evolution. It gives us food, cleans our water, oxygenates our air, deals with our wastes and stores our carbon, plus it’s our first and best line of defence against climate change – but we’re destroying it. It’s absolutely imperative that we reverse the trajectory we’re on and come together as a global community to put the protection and restoration of nature where it belongs, at the heart of our decision-making.”