Identify the correct statement/s from the following in relation to the 'UN COP 15'
A. The Global Biodiversity Agreement was approved by this Council.
B. The Global Biodiversity Agreement was done unde

Question

Identify the correct statement/s from the following in relation to the 'UN COP 15'
A. The Global Biodiversity Agreement was approved by this Council.
B. The Global Biodiversity Agreement was done under the Presidency of America.
C. China presided 'UN COP 15'.
D. There is a need to make efforts to reduce the consequences of climate change and the conservation of threatened species in the agreement.

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (4), which nominates statements A, C and D. The meeting the paper calls 'UN COP 15' is the fifteenth Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, and its decisive session was held at Montreal in Canada from 7 to 19 December 2022. Statement A is correct: this conference adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, the landmark agreement that replaced the earlier Aichi targets and set the world's biodiversity goals to 2030 and 2050. Statement C is correct and explains the agreement's double name: China held the presidency of COP15 throughout, having hosted the first and largely virtual part of the conference from Kunming in 2021, and asked Canada to host the resumed session in Montreal because its zero-COVID restrictions made an in-person meeting in China impracticable. The presidency stayed with China even though the venue moved, which is why the framework carries both city names. Statement D is correct as a description of the framework's content: it commits parties to protect thirty per cent of land and of oceans by 2030 and to restore thirty per cent of degraded ecosystems, to reduce the rate of human-induced extinction of threatened species tenfold by 2050, to halve food waste, and it addresses the interaction between biodiversity loss and climate change directly, since the two crises reinforce each other. That leaves statement B, which is simply the contradiction of statement C: the presidency was China's, not America's. Statements B and C cannot both stand, and the three wrong options all contain B — which means a candidate who establishes that B is false has answered the question without needing to test anything else. Option (4) is the answer.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 'A and B are correct' pairs a true statement with the false one. Statement A is right — the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework was adopted at this conference — but statement B assigns the presidency to America, and the presidency of COP15 was held by China. It is worth being clear about what a COP presidency is, because the confusion in this question depends on the distinction: the presidency belongs to the party that convenes and chairs the session and steers the negotiation, while the host is the country that provides the venue. Here the two came apart, with China presiding and Canada hosting, which is unusual and is exactly why an examiner found the point worth testing. The United States is not even a party to the Convention on Biological Diversity, having signed but never ratified it, so it could not have held the presidency of a conference of its parties at all.  (b) 'B and D are correct' admits the false presidency statement and one true statement about the agreement's content. Statement D is accurate: the framework requires efforts on the consequences of climate change and on the conservation of threatened species, and its targets include reducing the rate of human-induced extinction tenfold by 2050 and protecting thirty per cent of land and sea by 2030. But statement B is false, and the option also discards statements A and C, both of which are correct. The structural observation that saves time here is that statements B and C are mutually exclusive, since they name different countries for the same presidency; every option except the fourth contains B, so eliminating B eliminates three options at once. That is a large return on a single recalled fact, and it is the shape of many statement questions in this paper.  (c) 'B and C are correct' is self-contradictory on its face, because statement B says the agreement was concluded under the presidency of America and statement C says China presided over the same conference. A single conference has a single presidency, so the two statements cannot both be true, and an option that admits both is unsound whatever the facts turn out to be. Noticing that costs nothing and requires no knowledge of the conference at all. On the facts, statement C is the one that stands: China held the COP15 presidency from the first part of the conference at Kunming in 2021 through the resumed session at Montreal in December 2022. This option also excludes statements A and D, which are both accurate descriptions of what was adopted and what it contains, so it fails on every count available.

Concept: The Convention on Biological Diversity was opened for signature at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992 and rests on three objectives: the conservation of biological diversity, the sustainable use of its components, and the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from genetic resources. Its governing body is the Conference of the Parties, which meets every two years; two protocols sit under it, the Cartagena Protocol on biosafety and the Nagoya Protocol on access and benefit sharing. COP15 was the meeting that had to replace the Aichi Biodiversity Targets, agreed at Nagoya in 2010 for the decade to 2020 and substantially missed. What emerged was the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, with four long-term goals to 2050 and twenty-three targets to 2030, of which the best known is the commitment to conserve thirty per cent of terrestrial, inland water, coastal and marine areas by 2030 — the '30 by 30' target — alongside the restoration of thirty per cent of degraded ecosystems, a tenfold reduction in the extinction rate of threatened species by 2050, the halving of food waste, the protection of indigenous peoples' rights and traditional knowledge, and the first stand-alone gender target in the history of the Rio conventions. Because 'COP' names the governing body of any convention, the same abbreviation attaches to the climate convention and to the desertification convention as well, each with its own numbering.

State PCS 2023 Q93 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2023 Q93 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer