Germany: NGOs appeal to UN biodiversity conference

Environmental organizations appealed Tuesday to Angela Merkel to rescue a UN conference on biodiversity from failure, a day before the German chancellor was to open the conference?s final, political, phase. Merkel had to introduce movement into the largely deadlocked proceedings at the two-week conference being held in the German city of Bonn, environmental and development aid organizations said.

Some 6,000 delegates from almost 200 countries have gathered in Bonn for the ninth meeting of the parties to the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) primarily to discuss ways to halt the loss of species.

"Whether the conference fails or not is down to Merkel and the other ministers," Greenpeace spokesman Martin Kaiser said. "The Environment ministers won?t do it on their own. Merkel must speak to the various heads of state and government," Kaiser said.

Funding needed
Further funding was also needed, he said. Without this the poorer countries would not be convinced to enter into agreements on conservation measures. "The talks have become bogged down in all the important points. Every comma is being debated, as though it were a matter of life and death," a spokesman for the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), Joerg Roos, said.

According to the conservation bodies, the international community is currently investing up to 6 billion euros in conservation areas, compared with the 20-30 billion euros needed.

At the conference, which began May 19 and runs to Friday, Amazon Indians called for greater rights in the use of tropical rain forests. Their contribution to maintaining biological diversity there and to the stablisation of the global climate should be compensated, representatives of the indigenous peoples said.

Protect world seas
The IUCN international conservation union called on the conference to do more to protect the world's seas as a matter of urgency. An increasing number of oceanic species were threatened by extinction, and many oceanic biospheres were endangered, IUCN general director Julia Marton-Lefevre said. "Governments must finally decide on certain conservation areas and then work together for their protection," she said.

The conference, the last of the CBD parties before 2010, was the last real opportunity to cut the loss of diversity by 2010 and to create networks of oceanic protection areas by the goal of 2012, she said.

The CBD commits parties to halting species loss by 2010. The CBD has been ratified by around 190 countries, but crucially not by the United States.

More info
www.cbd.int/cop9