Rich and poor nations were poised to forge an ambitious pact to protect threatened ecosystems yesterday after breaking a deadlock over genetic treasures derived from places such as the Amazon.
The meeting in the central Japanese city of Nagoya aimed to produce a roadmap of 20 goals to be achieved over the next decade to contain humankind’s destruction of nature and save the world’s rapidly diminishing biodiversity.
Delegates from more than 190 countries had agreed to most of the goals during 12 days of tense negotiations.
However, a dispute over “fairly sharing” genetic resources, which are mostly found in rainforests and other species-rich habitats in developing countries, had held up an over-arching accord.
After frantic last-minute negotiations, Japan announced hours before the summit was to end that there had been significant progress with countries representing various regional blocs agreeing to a deal.
“A draft decision has been agreed upon by representatives of regional groups,” Japanese Environment Minister Ryu Matsumoto told delegates.
However, negotiators cautioned that each individual country still needed to approve the proposed “Access and Benefits Sharing Protocol” — and there could be yet another dip in the roller coaster ride seen during the summit.
“Getting closer to a deal in Nagoya ... but it’s not over yet,” European environment commissioner Janez Potocnik said in a message posted on Twitter.
A final plenary session in which, delegates hoped, the protocol and 20-point strategic plan would be adopted was set to begin shortly after 9pm.
Brazil, home to much of the Amazon basin and its global treasure trove of genetic resources, had insisted throughout the summit that it would not agree to the strategic plan unless there was also a deal on the protocol.
Brazil and other developing countries argue rich nations and companies should not be allowed to freely take genetic resources such as wild plants to make medicines, cosmetics and other products for huge profits.
The protocol would ban so-called “biopiracy” and outline how countries with genetic resources would share in the benefits of the assets’ commercial development by pharmaceutical and other companies.
The 20-point plan would commit countries to curbing pollution, setting aside areas of land and water for conservation, protecting coral reefs and ending so-called “perverse subsidies” for environmentally destructive industries.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
RSS