COP15 has started
Since December 7, the World Summit on Nature COP15 has been taking place in Montreal, Canada. Under the organization of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), states, NGOs and stakeholders in the field will work together until December 19 to find solutions to the most pressing problems in the field of nature conservation. UN Secretary-General António Guterres stressed at the start of the summit the urgency of achieving serious results:
“Unsustainable production and monstrous consumption habits are degrading our world. Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction, […], with a million species at risk of disappearing forever. All of this destruction comes at a huge price. Lost jobs, economic devastation, rising hunger, higher costs for food, water and energy, diseases, and a degraded planet. That was the central message I wanted to give to this Conference. Humanity’s war on nature is ultimately a war on ourselves.”
The Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) is also on site at COP15. Various side events will be offered on topics such as sustainable use assessment or IPBES assessments in general. More about IPBES' involvement in Montreal can be found here.
The team of the United Nations University Institute for Environmental and Human Security (UNU-EHS) is also monitoring the events of COP15. Jack O`Conor from UNU-EHS talks about the fact that the results of COP15 must not only be about nature, but also have an impact on the future survival of humanity.
The secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change emphasizes on social media during COP15 that we are in a triple planetary crisis. This consists of climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.