A group of elf-like elks play in a World Heritage wetland in Dongtai, East China's Jiangsu Province. After years of protection, the wetland has now become an important base for national biodiversity research in China. Photo: IC

The international community should agree on establishment of a new and transformative framework to strengthen conservation of biodiversity in the light of threats fueled by human actions and the climate crisis, senior officials from World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said in a statement on Sunday.

Marco Lambertini, director-general of WWF International, stressed that a global consensus was urgent to facilitate the establishment of a landmark pact to reinvigorate protection of species and speed up the positive growth of nature.

"We need a science-based, ambitious and measurable framework to reverse habitat loss, and put us on a path towards carbon neutrality," Lambertini said at a briefing on the sidelines of the fourth meeting of the open-ended working group on the post-2020 global biodiversity framework underway in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital.

The Nairobi meeting, according to Lambertini, should rise above partisan interests to agree on a text that could open a new chapter in global efforts to reverse unprecedented loss of species.

He noted that biodiversity loss had not only created an ecological crisis but had worsened poverty, food insecurity, water scarcity and declining health outcomes for grassroots communities.

Convened by the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, the June 21 to Sunday meeting in Nairobi is fine tuning the final draft of a global framework to re-engineer conservation of species over the next decade.

The post-2020 global biodiversity framework is expected to be adopted at the second and final part of the 15th conference of parties (COP15) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting slated for December 5 to 17 in Montreal, Canada.

Xinhua