Saving the rainforests
2002-04-17 14:08
The Hague - Environment ministers from 120 nations began two days of meetings behind closed doors on Wednesday to find ways of saving the world's threatened ancient rainforests.
It is one of the thorniest issues being tackled at a UN
biodiversity conference that opened in The Hague 10 days ago aimed at protecting natural habitats and sharing precious resources between the world's rich and poor.
Wednesday's meeting was opened by Dutch Prime Minister Wim Kok,
whose government resigned on Tuesday following a report that
criticised Dutch UN peacekeepers over the massacre of thousands of Muslims in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995.
According to UN estimates, one percent of tropical forest
disappeared each year throughout the 1980s - a 50 percent increase over the previous decade.
The conclusions from the environment ministers' two-day session
- aimed at thrashing out an action plan on the preservation and
sustainable use of forests - will provide key input at the next
Earth Summit in Johannesburg in September.
That forum hopes to build on the Convention on Biological
Diversity agreed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit in Brazil, which took effect the following year.
The accord commits signatories to sustainable use of the
planet's wildlife - everything that lives, ranging from bacteria
to whales.
The environment ministers are expected to adopt a declaration
committing themselves to halting or reducing by 2010 the "alarming rate" of the disappearance of natural habitats and species, according to the Dutch presidency.
However, diplomats say the 2010 target date is fiercely
contested by southern hemisphere countries and most industrial
nations, and suggest that the ministers may adopt a later date of
say 2020 or even hold off from fixing a timeframe. - Sapa-AFP
- SAPA