Yahoo News 27 Oct 10;
NAGOYA, Japan (AFP) – Japan will provide two billion dollars over three years to help developing countries save their ecosystems, Prime Minister Naoto Kan announced at a UN biodiversity summit on Wednesday.
"We will launch a 'life in harmony initiative' to support developing countries' efforts to compile and update their national strategies and implement them," Kan said. "We will provide assistance in the amount of two billion US dollars over three years from 2010."
Kan was addressing delegates from more than 190 countries who are in the central Japanese city of Nagoya to map out a strategy to save the world's plant and animal species from extinction.
The 12-day event is due to end on Friday with the UN aiming for a 10-year strategy that would set targets for protecting ecosystems and ending the loss of biodiversity that scientists say is threatening humans' lives.
Developing countries have insisted throughout the summit that, for a deal to be reached, rich nations must commit to financially helping them save their rainforests, waterways and other ecosystems.
The financing issue has been one of the major differences between rich and poor nations that threaten a meaningful deal being reached by Friday.
With environment ministers joining the negotiations on Wednesday to try to finalise a deal, Kan urged all countries to work harder to resolve their disputes.
"I would like to ask for enhanced efforts from representatives of each country," he said.
"(And) when the post-2010 targets are agreed upon, Japan is prepared to lead the world in achieving them."
Kan also proposed that the next 10 years be recognised by the United Nations as a "decade of biodiversity".
Japan to give 60 million dollars in biodiversity aid
Yahoo News 26 Oct 10;
TOKYO (AFP) – Japan plans to give about 60 million dollars to help developing countries protect species and habitats at a UN conference on biodiversity it is hosting, a government official said Tuesday.
"The government is preparing to announce aid worth roughly five billion yen to developing countries," an official with the Japanese environment ministry told AFP, without specifying which countries would benefit.
Local media reports said the fund, to be announced during the 193-nation meeting of the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya this week, would be offered to the CBD secretariat between now and 2014.
The aid aims to help developing countries draft national strategies for biodiversity conservation, and pay for expert training and cooperation in scientific data-gathering, the Asahi Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun dailies said.
The aid would also promote Japan's "Satoyama Initiative" -- a worldwide effort to help preserve so-called socio-ecological production landscapes such as the semi-wild woodlands traditionally found around Japanese villages.
The 12-day UN conference aims to to secure agreement on how to stop the rapid loss of the world's plant and animal species, as well as their habitats, to stem what biologists say is a global extinction crisis underway.
However, after the meeting's first week, environmental groups said the conference was becoming bogged down in the kind of acrimony between developed and developing nations that have also plagued UN climate change negotiations.
In one crucial stand-off, Brazil insisted there would be no overarching deal unless there was agreement on how to share the benefits of genetic resources such as wild plants from rainforests that are used to make medicines.
