Japan to give $60 million in biodiversity aid

I / Tokyo October 26, 2010, 15:14 IST

Japan plans to give about $60 million to help developing countries protect species and habitats at a UN conference on biodiversity it is hosting, a government official said today.
 
"The government is preparing to announce aid worth roughly five billion yen to developing countries," an official with the Japanese environment ministry told AFP, without specifying which countries would benefit.
 
Local media reports said the fund, to be announced during the 193-nation meeting of the UN's Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in Nagoya this week, would be offered to the CBD secretariat between now and 2014.
 
The aid aims to help developing countries draft national strategies for biodiversity conservation, and pay for expert training and cooperation in scientific data-gathering, the Asahi Shimbun and Sankei Shimbun dailies said.
 
The aid would also promote Japan's "Satoyama Initiative" -- a worldwide effort to help preserve so-called socio-ecological production landscapes such as the semi-wild woodlands traditionally found around Japanese villages.
 
The 12-day UN conference aims to to secure agreement on how to stop the rapid loss of the world's plant and animal species, as well as their habitats, to stem what biologists say is a global extinction crisis underway.
 
However, after the meeting's first week, environmental groups said the conference was becoming bogged down in the kind of acrimony between developed and developing nations that have also plagued UN climate change negotiations.
 
In one crucial stand-off, Brazil insisted there would be no overarching deal unless there was agreement on how to share the benefits of genetic resources such as wild plants from rain forests that are used to make medicines.