Observers have slammed the 'snail's pace' of negotiations and are pressing for a step up of ambitions.
The final version of the draft UN Convention on Biological Diversity will be negotiated in Kunming, China, at the Cop15 summit, which is expected to take place at the end of August.The outcome will decide for the coming decades how the world will address the challenges of reducing the extinction risk threatening more than one million species, protecting 30% of land and sea, eliminating billions of dollars of environmentally-damaging government subsidies and restoring degraded ecosystems.
After the first week, observers hit out at what they saw as a "glacial" rate of progress, but momentum has gathered during the final days, although "thorny issues" remain, including the financing of the plans. "Resource mobilisation at this meeting has become a thorny issue," Ghanaian academic Alfred Oteng-Yeboah, who has played a key role in international efforts to protect biodiversity, told the news agency, AFP.The vast majority of lemur species, unique primates found only in Madagascar, are on the brink of extinction