Environmental organizations call for $60 billion to save biodiversity

Nairobi, Mar 1 (EFE).- Major environmental organizations on Tuesday called upon the European Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, Canada and other rich nations to spend at least $60 billion each year for protecting biodiversity in developing countries.

The petition was made during the second part of the fifth session of the UN Environment Assembly, which is taking place this week in Nairobi, and comes ahead of a major round of UN biodiversity negotiations in Geneva later this month.

The $60 billion is needed to address the disproportionate impact on biodiversity of rich countries’ consumption habits, according to this group of organizations that include BirdLife International, World Wildlife Federation, and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), among others.

Ending the biodiversity crisis is just as important to humanity’s future as stopping climate change, said BirdLife Inernational CEO Patricia Zurita.

She added that to halt biodiversity loss and achieve a nature-friendly economy, the biodiversity financing gap needed to be addressed.

The organizations also called for the elimination of public and private investments that are harmful to the environment.

They claimed 30 percent of global threats to biodiversity are generated by international trade, especially because of trade in raw materials generated in developing countries are for use in rich nations.

ICUN chief Bruno Oberle underlined that resource consumption in the developed world has been one of the main drivers of biodiversity loss, but its consequences are borne mainly by communities and biodiversity in developing countries.

In 2019, a report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services warned that about one million species of animals and plants faced the danger of extinction and many could disappear in the coming decades, something unprecedented in human history. EFE

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