With US Apathetic, Expect Nothing From Nagoya Biodiversity Conference - Der Spiegel

EDIT

It is a list of failures that the international community had hoped to avoid. In 2002, the world agreed to take the growing wave of extinctions seriously using the 1992 Biodiversity Convention as a framework. The treaty calls for the protection of biodiversity, the sustainable use of natural resources and the fair distribution of profits made from the harvest of genetic resources. Eight years ago, the international community set a series of non-binding targets for the protection of biodiversity. The idea was to take regional, national and international action to decisively slow the rate of species loss.

But the goals were not met. Nagoya will now mark the end of this regrettable process. It is "obvious that the world community has failed to meet this target," said Jochen Flasbarth, head of Germany's Federal Environment Agency and current president of the Convention on Biological Diversity. At the summit in Japan, to be attended by representatives from 190 countries, Flasbarth will be handing his office over to a Japanese colleague.

Tokyo has been in diplomatic overdrive during the last several weeks in a last-ditch effort to avoid seeing the negotiations end in Copenhagen-style failure. "Governments need to take conservation of biodiversity seriously this time around," Leon Bennun, an ornithologist with BirdLife International in Cambridge, told the Inside Science News Service last week. "We cannot fail again."

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Jörg-Andreas Krüger, the deputy head of Germany's Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU) is optimistic. "The conference won't end in a crashing failure," he told SPIEGEL ONLINE. Still, he declined to offer any forecasts as to what success might look like. For one, international leadership is lacking. And the United States, as during the climate negotiations in Copenhagen, is not playing a productive role. Indeed, although the US has signed the convention, it has not ratified it -- joining the Vatican and Andorra as the only three countries in the world not to have done so. "The US is more part of the problem than part of the solution," says Krüger.

EDIT

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,723695,00.html

> Indeed, although the US has signed the convention, it has not ratified it
> -- joining the Vatican and Andorra as the only three countries in the world
> not to have done so.

That should really please all of the American anti-Catholics in GD (and elsewhere)
that they are now grouped with their arch-nemesis in terms of harm to the planet!

:rofl: