Montreal will host the second part of the UN Biodiversity Conference, COP15, in December.
The decision was confirmed during a meeting at the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity on Tuesday.
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 that as “there (were) pressure for the COP not to be postponed”, the United Nations had begun to look at other options. She had indicated that Montreal might become “the default option” because the organization’s office is headquartered in Old Montreal, on Saint-Jacques Street.
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.