The organizers of the UN biodiversity conference that drew to an end in Bonn Friday claimed success in conserving habitats and securing funding, while environmental organizations expressed disappointment at what they saw as slow progress, according to dpa. German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel, the conference president, said at the close of the high-level political phase that "greater consensus than hoped for at the start" had been reached. As delegates from the 191 participant countries to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) continued to haggle over the text of the final document, Gabriel said: "The CBD is alive again and back on the international political agenda." But environmental organizations Greenpeace and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) expressed scepticism. The conference had "confirmed the indifference of the international community when it comes to protecting forests, protecting the climate and conserving biodiversity," Greenpeace said. Proceedings had "inched forward like a snail" in the face of rapid species loss, it said. Greenpeace and the WWF cast doubt on whether the goal of significantly cutting species loss by 2010 could be reached. But both organizations welcomed additional funding for halting biodiversity loss promised by Germany, Norway and Finland. Gabriel said the conference had secured a "de facto moratorium" on marine fertilization, the controversial practice of seeding the seas with iron filings to promote algae blooms in the hope of absorbing carbon dioxide. CBD officials warn research is lacking on the impact on marine ecosystems. Gabriel highlighted the agreement struck on access and benefit sharing (ABS) from nature's resources, as the 12-day conference's main achievement. The ABS deal - known as the Bonn Mandate - has laid down a specific agenda to be discussed ahead of an agreement to halt "biopiracy" expected to be reached at the next CBD conference in the Japanese city of Nagoya in 2010. Poorer countries with unique natural resources are concerned at the patenting of indigenous remedies by the pharmaceutical industry without payments to the countries where they originate. Greenpeace and the WWF also saw the ABS deal as significant progress. CBD officials applauded significant progress on protected areas, with the initiative put forward by host country Germany to set up an internet-based "Life Web" to link countries offering protected areas with countries prepared to fund them. "This has been a major step forward," Gabriel said. More than 30 countries had proposed a total area over land and sea of 68 million hectares - equivalent to one-and-a-half times the area of Germany, he said, singling out Indonesia, Mexico and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Gabriel said that while there had been no substantive agreement on the controversial issue of biofuels, a work programme on the issue had been set up for the two years leading to the Nagoya conference. Greenpeace said no progress had been made here, with Brazil "resisting binding rules to prevent the destruction of tropical forests that occurs to make way for biofuel plantations." And it criticized lack of agreement on banning the trade in illegally logged timber, even though Gabriel claimed there had been progress in the shape of a call to countries for greater action. On the planting of genetically modified trees, Gabriel said there was agreement that there had to be a "thorough risk analysis" before they were used. The conference also saw significant announcements from participating countries. Brazilian Environment Minister Carlos Minc announced four new protected areas, three of them in the Amazon Basin and stressed his commitment to zero net deforestation by 2020. And Environment Minister Jose Endundo Bononge said DRC planned a huge new conservation area of up to 15 billion hectares - or the size of Greece. The conference is the ninth meeting of the 191 countries participating in the CBD, which was agreed at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and given added impetus at the Johannesburg Sustainable Development Summit a decade later.
