World Environment Day sends a 'Message for our Future'
5 June 2007, Berlin, Germany. Countdown 2010 together with the Convention on Biological Diversity, the UN Development Programme and the Equator Initiative today urged the Group of Eight countries to show leadership for biodiversity, climate change and community action. The ‘Message for our future’ was presented at a high-level event at Berlin’s Natural History Museum on the eve of this year’s G8 Summit in Heiligendamm.
The institutions see biodiversity loss and climate change as two major – and closely interlinked – challenges for humanity. Olav Kjørven of UNDP underscored how “a stable climate is essential to maintaining biologically diverse ecosystems and in securing peoples’ livelihoods, including the maintenance of food security and access to clean water. Biodiversity provides the world’s population – most directly, the poor in developing countries – with food, medicine, building material, and bioenergy. It is particularly noteworthy that developing countries are most directly affected by the consequences of climate change, while developed countries have contributed most to it”.
The recommendations for action presented by Countdown 2010 and the Equator Initiative call specifically for an increase of financial means to adapt to and mitigate climate change in the poorest countries, a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol, standards for biofuels and a reduction in emissions from deforestation.
The event also saw the opening of the joint exhibition on the 2010 biodiversity target ‘Nature – Our Precious Web’. In eight panels and 80 stunning pictures, Countdown 2010, GTZ, GEO and the Secretariat of the CBD show how biodiversity holds human society and economy together, and that its conservation should be in everyone’s interest.
