The United Nations very much relied on China for its environmental protection role, including its major funding for biodiversity conservation in the Global South, the organisation’s environment chief said on Thursday.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Regional Ecological Summit in Kazakhstan, Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said that “China has always been an active player in multilateralism”.
Andersen said that within UNEP, they “very much rely on China, together with the other 192 [member states], to play a steady role”.
“China has been a significant funder of biodiversity, which I want to give a huge shout-out to,” she added, pointing to its “monumental presidency” of the UN Biodiversity Conference, or COP15, which resulted in the 2022 adoption of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
The landmark framework set out 23 targets to be met by 2030 with the ambition of halting and reversing biodiversity loss, ultimately reaching a world living in harmony with nature by 2050.
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