Collectively in the COP15 collective, the participants are in different ways making their demands at the United Nations Conference on Biological Diversity (COP15), which runs until the 19th in Montreal, Canada.
Around 60 events are planned around the summit to mark the occasion, including open meetings, humorous and artistic workshops, a wall projection on the impact of oil drilling on whales and a grand march this Saturday.
Despite the fact that no head of state or government is taking part in the debates apart from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the COP15 is expected to achieve political momentum similar to that of the Paris Agreement with the adoption of an ambitious global compact.
Today the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) denounced that human activities are devastating marine species, with the latest data showing that 28 percent of the 150,388 species on the Red List are threatened with extinction.
Of the 17,903 identified threatened marine species, both animal and plant, 1,550 or 8.6 percent are threatened with extinction, while climate change is negatively affecting at least 41 percent of threatened marine species.
IUCN presented the latest data on endangered species revealing a perfect storm of unsustainable human activities decimating marine life around the world.
The director-general of this organization, Bruno Oberle, linked the fight against biodiversity loss to climate change and warned of the price of ignoring the two crises, since both bring about profound changes in economic systems, otherwise they would lose benefits, that the oceans provide.
rgh/crc