Hyderabad: The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) today unveiled a robust environmental strategy to address unprecedented levels of global biodiversity loss.
The new strategy - entitled 'The Future We Want: Biodiversity and Ecosystems -- Driving Sustainable Development' -- was released during the ongoing 11th Conference of Parties (COP) to the Convention on Biological Diversity here.
It calls for a significant scaling up of investments in 100 countries by 2020, UNDP said in a release.
As part of the plan, UNDP will work with national governments to protect biodiversity and manage ecosystems across 1.4 billion hectares of land and bodies of water, comparable to the area of Australia, India and Argentina combined, the release said.
"Human survival depends heavily on biodiversity and healthy ecosystems, yet in recent decades, the world has experienced unprecedented biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation, undermining the very foundations of life on earth," UN Under-Secretary General and UNDP Associate Administrator Rebeca Grynspan was quoted as saying in the release.
"As 1.2 billion people living in severe poverty depend directly on nature for their basic needs and livelihoods, this needs urgent international attention," she said.
PTI
First Published: Thursday, October 18, 2012, 22:30