Discussions are underway for Montreal to host the second part of the UN Biodiversity Conference COP15 next December.
This was explained by the Minister of Environment and Climate Change Monday morning during a press conference in the Quebec region.
“If it were to happen, it’s a major challenge, but also a prestigious event for Canada,” said Steven Guilbeault, without confirming that the event, which would attract several thousand people, will indeed take place in The city.
“Discussions underway, Canada was approached by the Secretariat of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity”, whose headquarters are in Montreal, explained the Minister of the Environment.
The 15th Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity kicked off in Kunming, China in the fall of 2021.
The event was held in a hybrid format, i.e. leaders participated online.
The second part of this conference was to take place this summer in China, but the health rules and the repeated confinement of large Chinese cities have forced the United Nations to consider a place other than Kunming.
In an interview with The Canadian Press on June 7, the Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity Elizabeth Maruma Mrema explained that China remained “the number one option”, but as “there is pressure for the COP not be postponed”, she explained that the United Nations “was starting to look at other options”, and Montreal could be “the default option”, because the organization’s office is headquartered in Old Montreal. , on rue Saint-Jacques.
Thirty years after the signing of the Convention on Biological Diversity at the Rio Earth Summit, the next COP is particularly important, according to Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, in particular because of “recent scientific evidence that biodiversity loss is occurring at an unprecedented and that the loss of biodiversity is also linked to other environmental problems such as pollution, land degradation, climate change”.
During a speech in Montreal earlier this month, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema referred to a particularly alarming report released in 2019 by the UN’s Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
More than half a million terrestrial species “have insufficient habitat for their long-term survival” and are at risk of extinction, many within decades, unless their habitats are restored, according to this report.
The rate of species extinction is accelerating, causing serious consequences for human populations and risking “eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life around the world,” said IPBES President Robert Watson when the report was published.