UNEP – Africa will neither accept replacement of the Kyoto Protocol, nor its merger with any new agreement, say African climate change negotiators meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia at the last African major preparatory gathering, before the UN Climate Change negotiations in Copenhagen in December.

Negotiators say actions for Africa should be voluntary and nationally appropriate, and must be fully supported and enabled by technology transfer, finance and capacity building from developed countries. Added to this, any new climate deal must include provision for Africa to be compensated for climate related social and economic losses.

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Nairobi - Momentum towards the establishment of a new international body to address the loss and degradation of the world’s multi trillion dollar nature-based assets gathered pace at a meeting of close to 100 governments.

There was strong support that an intergovernmental panel, similar to the one that has catalyzed political action on the issue of climate change, is now needed to galvanize a step change in respect to the management of biodiversity and ecosystems.

Governments agreed that there was now an urgency to strengthen the link between science and policy so that the knowledge being generated by researchers across the globe gets turned into action by governments on the ground.

Delegates, who were meeting at the headquarters of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), agreed that a final meeting would be held in 2010 on whether to establish an Intergovernmental Panel or Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).

2010 marks the International Year of Biodiversity when governments in 2002 agreed to reverse the rate of loss of biodiversity at the World Summit on Sustainable Development.

Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director, said:” The deadline date for this decision on IPBES is significant. This is the year when the world had hoped to have turned the tide on the loss of biodiversity. This however is unlikely to be achieved which does not undermine the goal but speaks volumes of the need for an effective mechanism which IPBES could represent”.

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