Fiji, March 31 -- After the success of the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015, France now wants to champion a similar global agreement for the protection of the world's biodiversity.
And the European nation is campaigning to push through a global pact on biodiversity at the next Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity 15th Session (COP15) to be hosted in Beijing next year.
It is now critical to have this global agreement given the rapid and dramatic loss of mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians and fish - a decrease of more than half in less than 50 years, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature's Living Planet Index report.
The report attributes the decline to habitat loss, pollution, climate change...