(Montreal) The Premier of Quebec has added his voice to other elected officials for the representatives of the 196 countries gathered at COP15 to adopt an ambitious framework to protect biodiversity.
In front of hundreds of delegates, François Legault expressed his desire “that in the history books, we can say that there was in 2022, a Montreal moment”, which “the planet needs”.
“We have an exceptional opportunity to change things,” said the Prime Minister.
He underlined that “morally, we cannot leave to future generations the responsibility of correcting our errors because unfortunately, if we are here today, it is because collectively, we have not, up to now, accorded to biodiversity all the importance that should have been accorded to it”.
The Prime Minister added that “now is the time to make commitments together, now is the time to adopt a global biodiversity framework to achieve, among other things, the goal of protecting 30% of land and oceans by 2030”.
François Legault was invited to speak after several elected officials, including the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, by videoconference, the President of the United Nations Assembly, Csaba Kőrösi, and the Minister of the Environment of Canada, Steven Guilbeault, during opening ceremonies of what is called the “high-level segment”.
This last part of the COP15 is the moment of the negotiations where the political representatives must put the final touches to the agreement to reverse the decline of biodiversity.
The 196 countries gathered in Montreal must agree by December 19 to put in place the global framework to protect biodiversity.
Blue Fund: a bill
Prime Minister Legault took advantage of his platform to announce that he will table, as of the next parliamentary session which will begin in January, a bill to set up the “Blue Fund”, a financing of 650 million for the health of the various bodies of water in Quebec.
The creation of the “Blue Fund” is a promise from the last election campaign and would be financed in part by the increase in royalties from industries that use the territory’s water.
A few months ago, François Legault indicated that this fund will be used in particular to fight against invasive plants, establish a new program to bring individual sanitary facilities up to standard, improve the financing of the Voluntary Lake Monitoring Network, create a shoreline cleaning, preventing water shortages, better characterizing the composition of municipal discharges, supporting farmers in revegetating riparian strips and funding water research.