I am excited to launch, together with the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Secretariat of the Convention, the Sharm El-Sheikh to Kunming Action Agenda for Nature and People. With the world gathering for the UN Environmental Assembly, I want to take this opportunity to urge Parties to the Biodiversity Convention to join with Egypt in renewing our commitment and reinvigorating our action to support biodiversity conservation, sustainable use and benefit-sharing.
As President of the fourteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 14) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), I challenge you to harness the energy we felt during those consultations in Sharm El-Sheikh and close the gap on the Aichi Biodiversity Targets before the next Conference of Parties, which will take place in 2020 in China.
We want all stakeholders to make strong commitments. But that’s not enough. Each of us also needs to bring along someone else. We need to work with people and groups of people from all sectors and all backgrounds and invite them to make their own commitments. We must engage everyone in this Action Agenda, because after all, everyone is a stakeholder when it comes to biodiversity.
- Her Excellency Ms. Yasmine Fouad, Minister of Environment of the Arab Republic of Egypt
