World leaders promise more action to protect planet

By Mario Villar

United Nations, Sep 28 (efe-epa).- International leaders from 64 countries pledged to take urgent steps to protect the planet from biodiversity loss and the climate crisis at a United Nations biodiversity summit on Monday.

The initiative, announced at a forum parallel to the UN General Assembly, includes promises to reduce pollution, end disposal of plastics in the oceans, pursue environmental crimes more vigorously and take ambitious steps under the Paris Climate Agreement.

It was signed by politicians from 64 countries, representing 1.4 billion people and a quarter of the world’s GDP.

Signatories included major economic powers such as the United Kingdom, Germany, France and the European Union as a whole, countries with threatened ecosystems and important oil industries such as Canada and Norway and Asian nations with large populations such as Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Latin American leaders, including the presidents of Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru also backed the pledge.

Among those who refused to join are the United States and China, the world’s biggest economic powers and largest emitters of greenhouse gases, Brazil, considered a key nation to protecting biodiversity, and other important countries such as Russia and India.

“We are in a state of planetary emergency,” the pledge reads.

“The interdependent crises of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation and climate change – driven in large part by unsustainable production and consumption – require urgent and immediate global action.”

The leaders have committed to a 10-point plan whose central objective is to put nature and biodiversity on the road to recovery by 2030.