Alexander Pracht
The United Nations biodiversity conference known as COP17 opened in Yerevan on Friday with a leaders summit. Multiple country leaders have arrived in Yerevan, including Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze.
In his speech at the opening of the summit, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan addressed Armenia’s environmental challenges.
“During difficult times for Armenia, our nature saved us, and we had the misfortune of abusing it,” Pashinyan said, referring to the troubled 1990s, when Armenia saw widespread illegal logging and poaching as its residents struggled to survive amid an acute humanitarian crisis.
“In the early 1990s, when import and production chains had broken down and there were daily food shortages in Armenia, the fish of Lake Sevan came to our rescue,” the prime minister said, adding that the whitefish population in the lake had increased more than tenfold over the past ten years, despite having at one point been on the verge of total extinction.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, who is also attending the summit, addressed global environmental problems.
“Climate chaos, invasive species, overgrazing and overfishing, excessive fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, and heavy metals – all these things are behind the planetary crisis of pollution and biodiversity loss,” Guterres said in his speech. “Environmental decline often falls hardest on the most vulnerable and those who did the least to cause the problem,” he added.
The main part of COP17 will begin on Monday and last for two weeks, with representatives of nearly 200 countries expected to discuss efforts to protect biodiversity, advance global conservation targets and address the challenges of implementing the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.
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