Global biodiversity data are highly uneven. Many developing countries are unable to assess the status of biodiversity in their territories using satellites or related monitoring technologies due to funding and regional conflicts, and have difficulty monitoring changes and destructive activities on a continuous basis.
This poses a challenge in assessing national conservation targets and measuring funding needs. As the first CBD COP since the new biodiversity targets were set, COP16 marks a new stage in bilateral environmental cooperation between China and Brazil: Brazil is considering adopting China's system of ecological red lines or a similar mechanism, as well as cooperating with China on satellite remote sensing monitoring to protect the devastated Amazon rainforest.
Speaking at a COP16 side event, Braulio Ferreira de Souza Dias, Director of Biodiversity at Brazil's Ministry of Environment and Climate Change and former Executive Secretary of the CBD, said: "Nowadays, to monitor restoration in Brazil, we have to send people into the field to measure each tree individually. We know that China is working on many different satellite images that we don't have in Brazil." Gao Jixi, Chief Scientist of the Satellite Application Center, Ministry of Ecology and Environment, China, is one of the early proponents of the "ecological red line". He also participated in this COP16 side event. To learn more about China-Brazil environmental cooperation, Dialogue Earth interviewed Gao Jixi at COP16.
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This story was produced as part of the 2024 CBD COP16 Fellowship organized by Internews' Earth Journalism Network. It was first published in Chinese in Dialogue Earth on November 4, 2024. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Banner image: At COP16, Gao Jixi (3rd from left) participated in a side event on bilateral environmental cooperation between China and Brazil. / Credit: Zhang Yiyi
Yiyi Zhang
