The country is home to a plant and animal diversity of great richness, but is far from having achieved the objectives set in Aichi, Japan, in 2010.
by Hélène Jouan (Montreal, correspondent)
While Canadian TVs and newspapers are just starting to look at the challenges of the World Conference on Biodiversity – COP15 – which begins its work Tuesday, December 6, the inhabitants of Montreal have been undergoing for several weeks , the inconvenience linked to the reception of such an event. Quarter of the Palais des Congrès Bluclé, closed metro station, deflected bus lines, traffic jams at all costs. The Quebec metropolis has attended the largest police system deployed on its soil for twenty years: five hundred agents daily mobilized on the ground, to welcome the expected 15,000 delegates, but also to prevent any risk of slippages, especially during the big demonstration scheduled for December 10 by a collective of nearly 70 environmental associations.
On the other hand, the protection of senior leaders on the planet is not a subject since no head of state or government is announced at this summit. Monday, December 5, only the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and that of Quebec, François Legault, hosts of the United Nations Conference, had confirmed their arrival.
The absence of the highest leaders of the 196 countries engaged in the Convention on Biological Diversity from the Rio Summit in 1992 is explained, among other things, by the unprecedented configuration of this meeting. Montreal, headquarters of the UN Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CDB), inherited the event, when China, after ensuring the first part of this conference in Kunming in the fall of 2021, had to give it to it Reason for anti-Cavid health measures always binding on its territory.
A country that presides, another that organizes: in view of the very tense current relations between Beijing and Ottawa – on the sidelines of the G20 summit on November 16, Xi Jinping has worked hard and publicly to Justin Trudeau, who was worried Possible Chinese interference in Canadian territory, to disclose the content of their conversations in the press -it is not written that their freezing collaboration allows this COP15, the “Parisian moment” for nature, hoped by some , in reference to the framework agreement obtained for the climate in Paris in 2015.
more than 1,200 species in danger
In order to achieve an agreement on the 22 objectives at the heart of this international conference, including that of protecting 30 % of land and sea natural environments by 2030, Canada intends to claim its role as environmental leadership. In a joint declaration published on November 11, the Canadian Minister of the Environment, Steven Guilbeault, his Quebec counterpart, Benoît Charette, and the mayor of Montreal, Valérie Plante, said that “mountains, forests, plains, rivers and oceans [ made] part of the “Canada and Quebec DNA” and that, as such, they were particularly well placed to contribute “actively to set up the partnerships necessary for the protection of biodiversity throughout the planet”.
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