Relocation of UN’s COP15 biodiversity conference raises questions about its legacy for China
- Country had hoped to take the lead in drafting conservation framework for next decade
- Coronavirus pandemic delayed planned October 2020 meeting in Kunming four times
“My first reaction was ‘why did this happen?’,” said David Guo, who works for an environmental NGO. “But after a second thought, I felt the relocation was correct because we didn’t have the conditions [to host the conference].”
He has organised biodiversity conservation activities in cities including Beijing, Shanghai, Suzhou and Kunming since 2019, when Kunming was chosen as the host city, and they have attracted tens of thousands of participants.
Guo also arranged study tours of nature reserves in Yunnan and Hainan, another southern province. However, with COP15’s move to Montreal, he said he had lost a driving force for organising such activities.
“We have a series of plans this year … but now, with the relocation of COP15, we have lost a good reason to carry out such activities,” he said.
The secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity announced on June 21 that COP15 would be held in Montreal, where the secretariat is based, in December. By then the conference had been delayed four times from its original date of October 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.