UN CoP 14 Convention on Biodiversity Report

I am just returning from CoP 14 (Conference of the Parties), the 25^th year of the Convention on Biodiversity, appropriately held in the militarized luxury desert resort of Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt. It’s a three week global event where the 140+ UN states who signed up in the historic Agenda 21 Declaration in Rio in 1992 meet up bi-annually to discuss how it’s all going. I have followed this from its very beginning, and will one day recount one of the most saddening and irresponsible stories of human greed and ignorance to my children, but that has to wait just a few years more … now we stand at a threshold, a cliff edge on which the countless lives of thousands of species are on the brink of extinction. The age of the Anthropocene – the period of geological history where humans are the main cause of mass extinction - is now in full swing, and we, the axe-wielding monkeys in the sacred matrix of life, are hacking away at the very foundations of the earthly paradise we call our biosphere. There is still time to herd a few more animals into the Arc, but not very much, and how we do it in the confusion of globalisation is not so easy …

Period	08/11/2018
Keywords	Biodiversity, good governance, Management, High Biodiversity Value
Target group(s)	Destinations , Businesses , Travellers , Education, Research, Consultancy , NGOs, Partnerships, Networks , Governments & Administrations
Topics	Knowledge Networking, Training and Education , Natural Heritage & Biodiversity , Good Governance & CSR