At the national conference on ecological protection, Chinese President Xi Jinping prioritizes a Beautiful China and harmonious modernization and highlights the vital next five years for a green future. How has China contributed to global ecological protection?

Dimitri de Boer: China has recently made a very important contribution to global biodiversity governance in the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. It's a new agreement, a global agreement by the UN, which, it's a bit similar to, maybe you're familiar with the Paris Agreement for climate change. So, what this is about, it's about biodiversity, it's about nature. And it recognized that the loss of nature, so we're rapidly losing nature around the world. So, since the 1970s or so, in the last 50 years, more than half of nature has disappeared, and that's very worrying. It's very concerning because we might be undermining the basis for life on Earth. So that has to be reversed, and the UN recognized that.

Now China played the role of presidency, so it's the presiding country in convening all of the parties, all of the countries around the world, to negotiate a new agreement for nature. It was extremely successful, and I can say I was there. And also, our organization ClientEarth has supported the EU-China dialogue negotiations in the years proceeding. So, for four years, we supported dialogue between China and Europe. And that also made an important contribution.

Once China and Europe had a strong alignment on what the agreement should look like, it was also quite easy for other countries to buy into that vision. So, it's been a great success, and even environmental organizations like mine, usually environmental NGOs, will always complain that things are not good enough and a lot more needs to be done. We're also very happy with that agreement. It was really spectacular work by the Chinese presidency. It's ambitious but also realistic.

What we care about is that you can have all the ambition in the world, but if it's not actually being achieved, you've got nothing, right? It's just targets in the air. So, the Kunming-Montreal Agreement made a lot of progress in that regard, to committing to more financing towards it, also strengthening the role that each country has to play in terms of reporting on their progress, setting better domestic plans, et cetera. So, it's a big deal.