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A KEY UN summit tasked with protecting biodiversity opened in China and online today, as countries meet to protect ecosystems and prevent mass extinction weeks before the COP26 climate conference.
Beijing, the world’s biggest polluter, has sought to position itself in recent years as a world leader on environmental issues after Washington’s withdrawal from international commitments under the Trump administration.
The online summit – setting the stage for a face-to-face meeting in April – will see parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) discuss new targets for protecting ecosystems by 2030.
Climate #COP26 starts in Glasgow on 31 October, but #COP15Biodiversity kicks off today (virtually) in #Kunming, China. Commissioner @VSinkevicius represents EU. Protecting nature from wildfires, climatechange and diseases is key. https://t.co/XYZzSdRQcR pic.twitter.com/IYuKFQH6wz
— Ciarán Cuffe (@CiaranCuffe) October 11, 2021
Up for debate are the ’30 by 30′ plan to give 30% of land and oceans protected status by 2030 – a measure supported by a broad coalition of nations, as well as a goal to halve the use of chemicals in agriculture and stop creating plastic waste.
“While there have been some success and progress, there have not been the breakthroughs needed to halt the ongoing loss of plant and animal diversity on earth,” CBD executive secretary Elizabeth Maruma Mrema warned at the opening session in the southwest city of Kunming.
We must take actions this decade to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and put biodiversity on a path to recovery by 2030 the latest.
China has not yet committed to the ’30 by 30′ plan, despite implementing an “ecological protection red line” system that already puts 25% of its territory out of the reach of developers.
This year’s COP15 gathering was originally set for 2020 and postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Around one million animal and plant species are threatened with extinction amid human encroachment on habitats, over-exploitation, pollution, the spread of invasive species, and climate change.
The CBD has been ratified by 195 countries and the European Union – although not the United States, the world’s biggest historical polluter – with parties meeting every two years.
Division over targets
Beijing is expected to unveil a statement known as the Kunming Declaration to set the tone for its environmental leadership.
Vice Premier Han Zheng said at the opening session that over 11,800 protected areas have been set up, accounting for 18% of China’s land mass.
But sharp divisions remain over the targets for urgent action over the next decade, casting doubts on whether a 2050 deadline to “live in harmony with nature” can be achieved.
France and Costa Rica are among a coalition of support for the initiative to declare 30% of oceans and lands protected areas before 2030.
But when scientists called for more ambitious protection of half of Earth’s biodiversity, Brazil and South Africa strongly opposed.
Other sources of tension surround financing, with developing nations asking rich countries to foot the bill for their ecological transitions and will be taken up at negotiations in Geneva in January 2022.
Global leaders have so far failed to achieve a single target to stem the destruction of wildlife and life-sustaining ecosystems set for the last decade, according to a devastating UN report released last week.
The biodiversity discussions at COP15 are separate from weightier COP26 summit set to begin next month in Glasgow, where world leaders are under pressure to act on the climate crisis.
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So in the end, Epic wants to use the Apple logistics system to deliver their apps to the users, but not to share their profits then.
Like when you ask Tesco to provide you with a few squaremeters in all of their shops for free to sell your products, use their trucks to deliver your goods to the shops for free and then sell vouchers for your products online and demand Tesco to accept those vouchers on their tills. And of course, if Tesco won’t advertise your product in their leaflets or try to charge you any fees for using their infrastructure, you’d sue them because of their monopolist behaviour.
@Claudia Varell: apple are taking far too big a cut of the profits and it has a knock on affect for the whole gaming industry, apple made more money off there 30% cut of ingame purchases than Nintendo xbox playstation and stadia combined did on there total sales, its madness and epic were right to stand up to them as it can be make or break for so many of the small companies that are losing all the profits to apple, the gaming industry is in danger of becoming only for the big guys and indie games have to fight so hard to even be seen never mind available to purchase
@Claudia Varell: I don’t think Tesco make a 30% profit on anything they sell, they work on a low margin model.
@Claudia Varell: In fairness, consumers own the hardware and apple have monopolized the only means of getting an app into it
Is anyone of you aware what Apples services include? Let’s say you write a book and sell it in Argentina. Do you know that you are liable for paying the correct VAT there and follow all regulations of the Argentinian market? The same applies if a German buys your book, someone in Australia, and so on. Especially for small content providers or the “Indie game developers” this is a huge barrier. You probably need to hire tax consultants in several countries or pay an agent.
If you sell through Apple, you don’t need to care. You can also give away your content for free without needing to care about distribution or anything and make yourself a name in the industry.
On top, you don’t need to sell through Apple, if you like to go on your own.
@Claudia Varell: Yeah you don’t need to care about all that as Apple don’t pay tax.. Apple taking a 30% cut, or whatever it is, just for providing the backend infrastructure for downloading to Apple device’s is absolutely extortionate. Should be done on some of sliding scale.
Apple have become very proprietary. I love their products. Hate their ecosystem.
Apple has always been proprietary. I worked there in the 1980’s and it was exactly the same then. In fact their completely integrated ecosystem is one of the things I love.
I understand that Apple are an extremely rich company that made some significant innovations years ago and have a fantastically loyal customer base but I’m not sure what their play is here.
If people can’t get the latest versions of Fortnite on their iPhone, surely they’ll get an Android or ask their parents for one?
But I guess it’s more about the principal of being able to squeeze app developers for all they’re worth so they can add more Money to their cash pile.
@Fifty Shades of Sé: You are aware that Google kicked Fortnite out of their Android Google Playstore as well?
@Claudia Varell: it’s still possible to download it onto an Android device though.
@Claudia Varell: You are massively missing the point. The entire issue here is not that they were kicked out of the store, but that the store is the only way for Iphone users to download it.
With android, that’s not the case so Google removing it from the play store doesn’t stop you from selling it on the android platform.
It’s the equivalent of not being able to download photoshop on your PC because Mocrosoft banned it from their store.
@Gavin Conran: No it’s not Gavin. When you buy a PC it’s running MS operating system, so of course you know it will run MS, Adobe applications etc. When you buy a Mac you know it will run Apple apps and ‘probably’ third party ones too, but if you expect it will run them all you didn’t sign up for the right hardware. Same with iOS. If you don’t want to part of the Apple offerings just go buy some other krap instead.
AAA gaming should have crashed in the 2010s, one of the greediest industries around.
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