Some 1,200 scientists, politicians and ecologists gathered in Paris on Monday for a five-day conference on biodiversity. The conference, held at UNESCO headquarters, opened with a call not to forget the lessons of December's deadly tsunamis in South Asia. "This is one of the lessons of the tsunamis: The mangroves, the coral reefs can play a key role against natural catastrophes," said Executive-Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, Klaus Toepfer. The Paris biodiversity conference, launched by French President Jacques Chirac in 2003, comes as human activity has accelerated the disappearance of species to 1,000 times its natural pace. The Convention on Biodiversity, signed in 1992, does not provide a framework to impose restraints of signatory states, as the Kyoto Protocol does for greenhouse emissions. The Paris meeting is not an official U.N. conference.
