They made the pledge ahead of the Biodiversity Summit in New York on Wednesday. By Monday, the heads of state and government from 66 countries and the European Union have endorsed this pledge. The leaders committed themselves to putting biodiversity, climate and the environment as a whole at the heart both of their countries' Covid-19 recovery strategies and investments and of their pursuit of national and international development and cooperation. They committed themselves to the development and full implementation of an ambitious and transformational post-2020 global biodiversity framework for adoption at the UN Biodiversity Conference in Kunming, China, in May 2021 as a key instrument to reach the Sustainable Development Goals. The leaders pledged to redouble their efforts to end traditional silo thinking and to address the interrelated and interdependent challenges of biodiversity loss, land, freshwater and ocean degradation, deforestation, desertification, pollution and climate change in an integrated and coherent way.

Source: Dhaka Tribune September 29, 2020 08:13 UTC