CANADA: A special three-day summit will be held in Montreal, Canada, on December 3-5, in a bid to promote an ambitious Global Biodiversity Framework accord to bend the curve on nature loss.

It will be the world community's fifth meeting to negotiate the agreement's outline, goals, and targets, which will be considered for adoption immediately following the 15th Conference of Parties to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15), which is now scheduled for December 7-19 in Montreal and will be chaired by China. The conference's high-level session will take place from December 13 to 15.

"The fourth negotiating session in Nairobi in June was expected to be the last," said Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Although progress was slow in Nairobi, it was made, notably on the sensitive topic of digital sequencing information for genetic resources.
"In December, the parties must decide whether digital sequencing information will be included in the framework or handled with independently." The additional negotiating days leading up to COP15 will be critical to answering that question and others, necessitating a small change in the dates of this historic summit." Originally scheduled for Kunming, China, in 2020, COP15 was pushed back because to the Covid-19 outbreak and eventually broken into two halves.

Part one was held successfully last October in Kunming, with Chinese President Xi Jinping and other state leaders from eight parties, with the UN Secretary-General, making online presentations to reaffirm their commitment to addressing the biodiversity issue.

The Kunming Declaration and President X's statement that China will invest 1.5 billion yuan to establish the Kunming Biodiversity Fund were other highlights of COP15 Part Two, providing strong political momentum to global biodiversity governance and a solid basis for the second part of COP15.

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