The UN biodiversity summit COP15, which was scheduled to take place in Switzerland in January, has been postponed due to the novel coronavirus strain Omicron, according to organizers.
Physical meetings have been postponed due to “uncertainties posed by the Omicron variant and resulting travel procedures and limitations,” they stated in a statement.
The Geneva meeting, which was originally scheduled for January 18-22, could be pushed back to March.
About 2,000 individuals, including 1,600 students, have been quarantined after two instances of Omicron were discovered on one of the campuses of the prestigious International School of Geneva, Swiss health officials announced on Thursday.
The first session of the COP15 summit took place in Kunming, southwest China, in October, albeit many people were unable to participate owing to the coronavirus outbreak.
It resulted in the passage of a declaration recognizing the value of biodiversity in human health, strengthening species protection laws, and improving genetic resource sharing.
Following Geneva, delegations were scheduled to meet in person in Kunming in late April for a third and final round of discussions to hammer out more specific conservation goals for the next decade.
The summit’s executive secretary, Elizabeth Maruma Mrema of the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, expressed hope that it would still go forward when the time was appropriate.
“I am convinced that, when it is safe to meet in person again,” she said, “we will hold these meetings and progress on our road to Kunming and the successful acceptance of the post-2020 global biodiversity framework.”
The biodiversity deliberations at COP15 are different from the more important COP26 summit on climate change, which took place in November.
