Monitoring Desk
MONTREAL: At a UN summit in Montreal on Thursday, the world’s environment ministers started the crucial final round of negotiations to forge a historic “peace agreement with nature.”
Although a lot of work remains to bring the deal to completion, fresh international finance guarantees from certain affluent donor countries may assist to improve the mood after negotiations seemed to be in jeopardy.
Climate financing
The fate of the earth is in jeopardy, as is the ability of humanity to stop the extinction of an estimated million plant and animal species due to habitat degradation, pollution, and the climate catastrophe. The largest obstacle is probably the tricky question of how much money wealthy nations will give to poorer nations to protect their ecosystems.
Financial pledges at UN summit
Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, and the United States all made higher pledges of climate financing on Thursday, joining Germany, France, the EU, the United Kingdom, and Canada who had earlier amended their commitments upward.
Virginijus Sinkevicius, European Commissioner for the Environment, told AFP that “this step forward is really crucial.”
Claire Blanchard, from WWF International, said, “These new declarations and reminders of existing pledges are a good signal of the much-needed political will in Montreal.”
However, it’s unclear whether the new commitments would be sufficient to appease the Global South nations, who account for the majority of the world’s surviving biodiversity. In contrast to the current financing level of roughly $10 billion, dozens of countries, including Brazil, India, Indonesia, and several African nations, are requesting a much more ambitious budget of $100 billion a year, or one percent of the world GDP, until 2030.
Developing nations desire a new Global Biodiversity Fund (GBF) to assist in achieving their objectives, such as creating protected areas.
Rich nations, meanwhile, are opposed and advocate for making the current financial system more accessible. Earlier, the disagreement led to a brief walkout.
China and UN Summit
In a video message that launched the high-level discussion with 200 ministerial-level delegates, Chinese President Xi Jinping said, “We must work together to achieve harmonious coexistence between man and nature.”
Due to rigorous Covid regulations, China, which is chairing the COP15 summit but not hosting it, stepped in to host the UN Nature Summit gathering in Montreal, one of the coldest cities of North America, in the dead of winter.
