NEW YORK, JANUARY 30 – Ahead of the 2020 UN Biodiversity Conference in Kunming, China, on 15-28 October 2020, consultations on its “zero draft” were co-facilitated at the UN Headquarters by the delegations of Italy and Costa Rica. “Focus on how to strengthen the active participation of civil society”, the Italian mission said on Twitter.
The negotiations followed a “productive exchange of views” among the Italian Permanent Representative to the UN Mariangela Zappia and her colleague from Costa Rica with the President of the UN General Assembly, Tijjani Muhammad-Bande. “Ready to work together with all the membership to make 2020 a critical year of action for nature”, the Italian delegation said after the meeting.
“Ecological Civilization: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth” will be the theme of the Conference as announced by the co-organizers, the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Cristiana Paşca Palmer.
“This theme is intended to promote the building of a common future for all life on Earth and to stress that human beings and nature share only one planet. Nature must be respected, sustainably used and conserved to achieve the Vision of the Convention on Biological Diversity ‘Living in Harmony with Nature’ by 2050, and to advance on the three objectives of the Convention,” the Minister of Ecology and Environment of China, Li Ganjie said last September when the theme was announced: “We believe that this theme embodies the will of the international community to leverage green sustainable development approaches, in an inclusive manner, to build a shared future for all life on Earth.”
During the 2020 Biodiversity Conference, the 196 Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity are expected to adopt a new global framework to safeguard nature and its contributions to human well- being. The agreement will serve as a roadmap to achieve the Convention’s three objectives: conservation of biodiversity, sustainable use of its components, and equitable sharing of benefits from the use of genetic resources.
The 2020 UN Biodiversity Conference will hopefully set the world on a socio-ecologically centred development pathway for the decades to come, inspired by the theme of COP15, “Ecological Civilization: Building a Shared Future for All Life on Earth”.
Negotiations officially got under way last Summer with the first session of the Open-Ended-Working Group, under the UN CBD, held from 27-30 August, in Nairobi, Kenya. The next round of negotiations is scheduled for February 2020, in Kunming, China, and the third round in Colombia in July 2020. (@OnuItalia)
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