The world’s largest conservation conference will have a ceremonial kick-off in Colombia on Sunday, with host city Cali on high alert after threats from a guerrilla group.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will deliver a video address to guests gathered for the event attended by Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who said on Friday he was “nervous” about security.
The high-stakes UN biodiversity meeting will officially open on Monday under the protection of thousands of Colombian police and soldiers, assisted by UN and US security personnel.
Armed police were able to patrol the city center, the conference venue and the airport on Sunday.
About 12,000 delegates from almost 200 countries, including 140 ministers and a dozen heads of state, will attend the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), which runs until November 1.
With the theme ‘Peace with Nature’, it has the urgent task of devising monitoring and financing mechanisms to ensure that the 23 UN targets agreed in 2022 to halt species destruction can be met by 2030 .
But Colombia’s EMC rebel group, a splinter of the FARC guerrilla army that was disbanded in 2017, has cast a shadow over the event, urging foreign delegations to stay away and warning the conference “will fail.”
The threat came after EMC fighters were targeted in a military attack in the southwestern Cauca department, where the group is accused of involvement in drug trafficking and illegal mining.
Cali is the closest major city to the area controlled by the EMC, which is engaged in fraught peace negotiations with the government.
Petro said Friday: “We are all nervous (hoping) that nothing bad happens… There are people who would like (the meeting) to be a showcase of violence and death.”
However, Cali Mayor Alejandro Eder stressed that “we have been working since February to protect the city of Cali… We have more than 10,000 police officers, we also have detachments of the Colombian Armed Forces guarding the entire perimeter of the city. We have air protection, protection against drones.”
– Time is running out –
Delegates have just five years left to reach the UN goal of bringing 30 percent of land and sea areas under protection by 2030.
World-renowned British primate expert Jane Goodall warned ahead of the summit that there was little time to reverse the downward trend.
“The time for words and false promises is over if we want to save the planet,” Goodall told AFP this week.
According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which maintains a red list of endangered animals and plants, more than a quarter of assessed species – around a million in total – are threatened with extinction.
To try to reverse the trend, the so-called Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework has adopted ambitious targets for 2030, progress that COP16 must assess.
Carlos Ignacio, a representative of an indigenous Guatemalan association who traveled to Cali for the event, told AFP he hoped COP decisions “will be made by nature, and not by business. Because what’s the point of having money if I don’t have room? to live?”
Host country Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, and Petro has made environmental protection a priority.
But the country has struggled to extricate itself from six decades of armed conflict between left-wing guerrillas such as the EMC, right-wing paramilitaries, drug gangs and the state.
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