Conservation meet mulls plan to save 80% of Amazon

Conservation meet mulls plan to save 80% of Amazon

MARSEILLE: Should 80 percent of the Amazon be declared a protected area by 2025? The world’s top conservation body is poised to decide whether its 1,400 members can vote on this controversial proposal, put forward by indigenous groups. Submitted under an emergency provision to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the measure calls for a “global action plan” to halt rampant deforestation and the destructive extraction of precious minerals and oil.

Over the last two decades, the Amazon has lost roughly 10,000 square kilometers every year, according to assessments based on satellite data. “That’s the emergency, not just for us but for humanity,” Jose Gregorio Diaz Mirabal, a leader of the Curripaco people in Venezuela, told AFP at the Congress venue in Marseille.

For the first time in the IUCN’s 70-year history, indigenous groups have a separate status alongside government agencies and national or international NGOs. Diaz Mirabal submitted the Amazon proposal for the newly admitted organization COICA, which represents more than two million indigenous people in nine Amazon nations. “We have been neglected, and now we have a voice and will exercise that voting right,” he said.

‘Territory of humanity’

Recent research has warned that massive destruction of tropical forests