Elizabeth Mrema: Protecting the world's biodiversity.

Elizabeth Mrema, the Executive Secretary of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), grew up in Moshi, a town located on the lower slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro in northern Tanzania. Her early years surrounded by nature profoundly influenced her and her work.

'I grew up seeing our villages full of trees. But as I continued to grow... the outlook began changing. The bush, the forest I was seeing, you see more holes and spaces, [and] the weather kept changing. And as I speak, even those rivers - when you hear the water flowing in the streams at the backyard - have completely dried up.'

In August 2022, the world will convene in Kunming, China, to adopt a new framework for protecting the world's biodiversity called the 2050 Vision of 'Living in Harmony with Nature.' The framework sets out an ambitious plan to implement actions to bring about a transformation in the world's relationship with biodiversity and to ensure that, by 2050, the shared vision of living in harmony with nature is fulfilled.

'Biodiversity, just like all other environmental issues, there are cross-cutting issues - the challenges are cross-cutting, and therefore governments alone or at national level ministries of environment alone will not be able to solve all the challenges or to implement all the targets as expected,' says Ms. Mrema.

Protecting the world's biodiversity - UN Climate Thought Leaders: Elizabeth Mrema

The CBD was established following the Earth Summit in the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, which paved the way for the establishment of three major conventions on the environment - on biodiversity, climate change and land degradation.

This year, 30 years after the Earth Summit, the conferences of the parties to the three conventions - starting with the Abidjan Summit on desertification in May, followed by the Kunming Conference on biodiversity in August and the Climate Change Conference in Egypt in November - provide an opportunity to demonstrate how the challenges of and the solutions to land degradation, biodiversity loss and climate change are fundamentally intertwined.

'The journey begins in Cote d'Ivoire, with the Convention to Combat...