Deadlock in UN biodiversity talks in Nagoya

Karl Malakunas Yahoo News 24 Oct 10;

NAGOYA, Japan (AFP) – UN talks aimed at brokering a deal to protect the world's diminishing natural resources have made little progress, green groups said ahead of the summit's crucial second phase starting Monday.

The 12 days of negotiations in the central Japanese city of Nagoya are aimed at securing agreement on how to stop the rapid loss of the world's plant and animal species, as well as their habitats.

But after the first week environment groups said the conference was becoming bogged down in the same kind of acrimony between developed and developing nations that have plagued UN climate change negotiations.

"What we need to see is a global alliance to protect life on earth but what we have seen so far are alarming divisions and a hardening of positions," WWF international director general Jim Leape said.

In a best-case scenario, the negotiations would wrap up on Friday with a set of agreed targets for slowing the dramatic rate of biodiversity loss by 2020.

There would also be a deal on how developed countries would provide poor ones with funding to protect the world's natural habitats, plus an agreement on how to equitably share genetic resources.

However, the WWF and other environment groups monitoring the event said rich and poor nations were at loggerheads over many aspects of the potential agreement.

In one crucial stand-off, Brazil was insisting there would be no overarching deal unless there was agreement on how to share the benefits of genetic resources such as wild plants from forests that are used to make medicines.

Developing countries, which have most of these genetic riches, want an "equitable share" of the profits Western companies enjoy from the natural resources.

Some of the sticking points on this issue are determining exactly which resources would be included and whether a potential agreement would be retroactive.

Greenpeace policy advisor Nathalie Rey said the negotiations were in danger of heading the same way as climate change talks in Copenhagen last year, when world leaders failed to secure a binding agreement to tackle global warming.

"The world can't afford another Copenhagen," Rey, who is in Nagoya, told AFP.

But the European delegation insisted there had been some progress and that a deal could be achieved in Nagoya.

"There are some outstanding issues but... we are seeing movement forward," Karl Falkenberg, the European Commission's director general of the environment, told reporters.

"For the moment I am satisfied with the progress, I would have wished for it to be faster... but we hope we can still conclude negotiations successfully."

There are also hopes the talks will pick up steam when environment ministers arrive in Nagoya this week and take over from their advisers for the final three days of the summit.

On the opening day of the talks last Monday, delegates from the 193 members of the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) were told that a meaningful deal in Nagoya was crucial to save the world's biodiversity.

"Business as usual is no more an option when it comes to life on Earth," CBD executive secretary Ahmed Djoghlaf said in his opening address.

"We need a new approach, we need to reconnect with nature and live in harmony with nature."

Delegates were told human population pressures were wiping out ecosystems such as tropical forests and coral reefs, killing off animal and plant species that form the web of life on which humanity depends.

"This meeting is part of the world's efforts to address a very simple fact. We are destroying life on Earth," said the UN Environment Programme's executive director, Achim Steiner.