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Global biodiversity panel knocked back at UN talks
2008-11-13
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP) - Plans for a scientific panel on biodiversity, similar to a Nobel-winning group on climate change, have been knocked back by representatives of 80 countries at UN-sponsored talks. Government officials and representatives of 129 organisations held a three-day conference in Malaysia to discuss the need for an Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The IPBES would have mirrored the functions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change under the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), which helped drive climate change to the top of the global agenda. The panel was intended to be an independent authority on species loss, bringing together experts who can guide governments on the issue, amid warnings about the accelerating rate of extinction and its implications for humans. "Many delegates supported the need for (a platform)... but others considered that it is too early to conclude whether there is a need for a new and independent body," the UNEP said in a statement late Wednesday. Delegates, who included representatives from the United States, China, India and African and European nations, called for a study into the weaknesses and strengths of all existing mechanisms before embarking on a new panel. UNEP boss Achim Steiner had said at the opening of the conference that the IPBES was aimed at bringing scientific knowledge on biodiversity into the political arena to enable governments to make informed decisions. "Data alone does not create options on how to act, you have to turn that into politically and economically viable actions," he said at the meeting in Malaysia's administrative capital Putrajaya. Malaysian officials said on condition of anonymity that the Putrajaya conference was "too premature to be able to reach any decisions". "There were fears by some that this was just another agenda waiting to be hijacked by the north to dictate to the south and to curtail their development activities. There is still a long way to go," one official told AFP. He was referring to allegations by developing nations in the global "south" that the industrialised "north" is unfairly imposing on them the burden of addressing issues like climate change. The conference did not decide when and where the next round of meetings would be held. Biodiversity advocates have struggled for decades to sound the alarm over the need for a plan to save Earth's vanishing flora and fauna, much of it in tropical rainforests and the sea.
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